How can we enrich human experience and augment human abilities by enabling people to create and shape their own user experiences?

My work explores and researches the futuristic implications of a computationally driven individual-centered adaptable and adaptive world. In particular I'm interested in user generated malleable objects, spaces and software artifacts. Where everyone is able to pull, twist, and reshape objects to their individual needs and wishes. Ideally without requiring expert knowledge or skills.

Objects can be as simple as bean bags that remember your shape, or kitchen forks whose length and weight distribution can be easily altered by pulling on each end of the fork. Objects can be manifested as thought experiments, physical objects, virtual objects or any mixture of bits and atoms with a dose of digital smarts.

In a world where everything is malleable human physiological differences constrain the design space from which self-designing and user designed objects can emerge. For example clothes aren't designed for people with three arms because designers implicitly model standard human physiology.

As part of my PhD I developed methods for measuring design effectiveness and enabling design adaptions based on individual physiological differences. Particularly focused on individual psychophysical differences in low-level vision.

With the techniques I developed, predictions can be made about how easy or hard a visual design or information visualisation is to see. Then the predictions can be used to improve the display of complex visualisations and designs to suit individual differences in eye function.

 
Publications - Peer Reviewed

• (to appear) Lado Insua, G., Bennett, M., Nixon, P. and Coyle, L. "Meaning Makers: User Generated Ambient Presence", International Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence. Vol. 1, No. 2, April-June 2009.


• Lado Insua, G., Bennett, M., Nixon, P. and Coyle, L. "User Generated Ambient Presence", Proc. of 2nd Workshop on Ambient Information Systems. Colocated at Ubicomp 2008, Seoul, South Korea, September 21, 2008, CEUR Workshop Proceedings, ISSN 1613-0073 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M. and Quigley, A. "Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences", ACM AVI 2008 Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, Napoli, Italy, May, 2008 [ paper pdf | poster pdf ]


• (Awarded Best Poster) Bennett, M. "Understanding Distance & How Humans See Interfaces & Designs", VGV 2008 Irish Graduate Student Symposium on Vision, Graphics and Visualisation, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, June, 2008 [ poster pdf ]


• Bisht, M., Swords, D., Quigley, A., Gaudin, B. and Bennett, M. "Context-Coded Memories: Who, What, Where, When, Why", at workshop MeMos 2007: Supporting Human Memory with Interactive Systems at the British HCI International Conference (HCI 2007), Lancaster University, UK, 4th Sept 2007 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M. and Quigley, A. "A Method for the Automatic Analysis of Colour Category Pixel Shifts During Dichromatic Vision", in 2nd International Symposium on Visual Computing (ISVC), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol 2, pages 457-466, Springer Verlag, Lake Tahoe Nevada, USA, 6th-8th November 2006 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M., O'Modhrain, S., and Quigley, A. "Here Or There Is Where? Haptic Egocentric Interaction with Topographic Torch", presented at workshop on The Next Generation of Human-Computer Interaction at CHI 2006, Montréal, Canada, April 2006 [ paper pdf ]


• Bennett, M. "A Framework for the Rapid Prototyping of Zoomable User Interfaces", Masters Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University College Dublin, Ireland, 2005 [ thesis pdf ]


• Bennett, M., and Cummins, F., "ORRIL: A Simple Building Blocks Approach to Zoomable User Interfaces", in Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Information Visualization, pages 639-644, London, July 2004 [ paper pdf ]


• Brucker-Cohen, J., Bennett, M., Agamanolis, S., Cummins, F., and Doyle, L. "Bumplist: Developing Beneficial Email List Structures", CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Vienna, Austria, 24th-29th April 2004 (poster) [ pdf ]

 
Publications - In Progress

• (in progress) Bennett, M. "Individual Psychophysical Differences In Vision Applied to Visual Designs"

 
Publications - Non-peer Reviewed

• Bennett, M., Quigley, A. and Gaudin, B. "Information Visualisation in the Systems Research Group", in Proceedings of iHCI07 - The First Irish Human-Computer Interaction Conference, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland, 2nd May 2007 [ slides pdf ]


• (Awarded Best Poster) Gaudin, B., Bennett, M., Sheehan, B., and Quigley, A. "From Migrations to Population Concentration (Large Scale Census Data Visualization)", CASCON 2006 Dublin Symposium, IBM Centre for Advanced Studies, Dublin, Ireland, 17th October 2006 [ poster pdf ]


• Bennett, M. "Automatically Evaluating The Impact Of Colour Blindness On Information Visualisations", CASCON 2006 Dublin Symposium, IBM Centre for Advanced Studies, Dublin, Ireland, 17th October 2006 [ poster pdf ]

 
Software Artifacts

• Gestural Hearing
• Nutmeg
• Media Dive
• wayV (download: here)
• GAC
• Goofy