Exertion Games Lab

Josh has received a SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award. There are only 3 recipients for the best HCI PhD thesis, so this is an outstanding achievement! Congratulations Josh, well deserved!

Josh Andres’ dissertation (Integrated Exertion – Understanding the Design of Human–Computer Integration in an Exertion Context) helps to move human-computer “interaction” to human-computer “integration” by considering the active human body in a user-computer partnership. Josh used design research to investigate how to integrate computational machinery with the active human body to extend the user’s abilities. He exemplified this by designing three eBikes that use three different data types, motion, traffic lights, and EEG (electroencephalography) to integrate with the exerting user and make cycling safer and more engaging. 

This research is timely and increasingly ethically important, as integrations between users and computers are gaining potency through technological advances that allow the user and computer to work together more tightly. His work can guide interaction designers on how to, and in an inclusive manner, amplify a person’s sensations of their abilities in an exertion context to create “superpower”, “co-operative” and “symbiotic” human-computer partnerships. 

Josh undertook his PhD at the Exertion Games Lab in Melbourne, Australia, with support from Monash University, IBM Research Australia, and RMIT University, and it was co-supervised by Florian’ Floyd’ Mueller, Jürg von Känel and Jonathan Duckworth.