This paper introduces the Coastal Community Thinking Toolkit (CCTT)—an analog visual mapping system for the co-production of situated coastal knowledge—as a design inquiry into Sustainability through and of HCI. Grounded in infrastructuring as a design-in-use paradigm, the CCTT was conceived as a design seed and enacted within an eight-week residential training program on sustainable coastal development, involving 20 professionals from 14 countries across two workshops and ongoing informal interactions. Our analysis focuses on Points of Infrastructuring (PoIs): in-use moments that reveal a system’s limitations and potential. We contribute an expanded PoIs grammar for early-stage systems and an analog-first approach to support appropriation, sustained iteration, and informed digital upgrading. While positioning infrastructuring as a strategy for aligning Sustainability through and of HCI, we conclude by stressing its value in advancing ocean-focused SHCI and supporting ocean governance efforts to set up an inclusive digital ocean ecosystem.

Amid growing attention to ocean sustainability, coastal communities emerge as uniquely insightful yet underinvestigated socio-ecological systems, prompting calls for more inclusive tools for collaborative sense-making. To address this, we designed the Coastal Community Thinking Toolkit (CCTT), a visual mapping device that enables the representation of coastal communities across diverse purposes and contexts. We present the toolkit together with findings from a pilot involving a heterogeneous group of 20 ocean professionals, primarily from African countries. We contribute an artefact that operates as a boundary object, clarifying the many facets of its boundary-crossing potential. Responding to calls for more impact-oriented and interdisciplinary Sustainable HCI, this pictorial also serves as a resource for community managers and activators, as well as researchers, seeking participatory methods to facilitate collaborative sense-making about and with coastal communities.

Technologies for older adults largely focus on monitoring, safety, and functional support, with less attention to everyday emotional meaning-making. Reflective practices can support emotional wellbeing in later life, yet reflective tools tailored to older adults, particularly in India, remain limited. Self-perceptions of aging (SPA) are strongly linked to emotional wellbeing, but SPA work largely relies on questionnaires and clinical formats rather than culturally grounded tools for reflection. This pictorial presents a research-through-design process leading to a culturally grounded reflection tool for older adults in India. It combines SPA-based reflection cards and prompts with non-diagnostic reflective guidance drawn from a curated corpus rooted in cultural understanding. The work co-designed SPA reflection cards grounded in older adults’ metaphors and narratives, and developed the guidance system with older adults and domain experts. It contributes design knowledge on operationalizing SPA in culturally attuned, technology-mediated reflective tools for older adults in urban India.

Natureculture design involves complex, more-than-human relationships that challenge conventional forms of representation and evaluation. Transmedia experiences offer a way to engage with this complexity through interconnected media, spaces, narratives, and social interactions. Yet, design and HCI research lack methods to evaluate such experiences holistically. This pictorial introduces the Relational Entanglement Diary (RED), a situated mixed-method evaluation tool designed to assess engagement with transmedia journeys as interconnected trajectories rather than isolated interactions. We present the research-through-design process of developing RED, and its deployment across two natureculture sites, each tailored to local contexts and transmedia configurations. Drawing on participant diaries, observational data, and reflective analysis by the research team, we examine how RED captures the relational and transmedia values it aims to reveal. Our discussion suggests RED provides a flexible approach for evaluating complex transmedia experiences and contributes a methodological advancement for design and HCI research focused on relational and more-than-human engagement.

Peer-reviewed publication produced within the LoGaCulture project (Locative Games for Cultural Heritage). This record is a deposit of the publication published in Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Creativity and Cognition, persistent identifier https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3807552. LoGaCulture has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101094036.

Spatial computing integrates augmented reality and location-aware systems, enabling digitally mediated interactions within physical environments. As these systems increasingly shape social life, understanding how they foster a sense of community is critical for Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). This paper examines Pokémon Go, a location-based XR game, to explore how community emerges through intertwined digital and physical practices. Drawing on an exploratory qualitative study based on 11 semi-structured interviews with players in diverse urban contexts, we identify five interrelated dimensions of community formation: recognition, communality, solidarity, emotional bonds, and collective thirdspace. Our findings show how spatial computing mediates shared spatial perception and interaction, allowing community ties to persist across physical and digital contexts. We contribute to HCI by operationalizing the sense of community in hybrid interaction settings and introducing collective thirdspace as a conceptual lens for understanding community formation in location-based spatial computing systems.

This pictorial explores hybrid forms of political participation from a migrant perspective, focusing on diaspora protests in one European city following the March 2025 arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu. Building on the first author's (FA) autoethnographic recounts, it examines how distance, digital mediation, and everyday life shape engagement with homeland politics. In contrast to protests embedded in Istanbul's political atmosphere, diaspora participation unfolded without spatial cues, generating affective tension, ethical dilemmas, selective forms of engagement, and the labor of the diasporic mind. Through activist-academic reflection, the work highlights hybrid experiences across space, emotion, and mediation, offering insights for HCI research on diaspora and transnational activism and social movements.

PathWriter is a no-code platform for authoring and playing location-based games that integrate more-than-human (MtH) perspectives into heritage contexts. By putting creative tools directly in the hands of professionals and communities, it demonstrates how locative gaming can drive change. The platform features a web-based creator dashboard and a mobile-first player interface integrated within a single infrastructure. Authors without programming backgrounds can create human and MtH characters, define points of interest, configure narrative card prompts, and customize an LLM-powered AI companion. Games authored through PathWriter are published in a shared public library, enabling players to both create and experience location-based stories. They can engage with heritage sites on-site or remotely, guided by Hero’s Journey-inspired prompts. At the demonstration, attendees will be invited to author a short game and play a pre-authored experience, directly engaging with both sides of the platform.

Frontend code, replicated across millions of page views, consumes significant energy and contributes directly to digital emissions. Yet current AI coding assistants, such as GitHub Copilot and Amazon CodeWhisperer, emphasize developer speed and convenience, with energy impact not yet a primary focus. At the same time, existing energy-focused guidelines and metrics have seen limited adoption among practitioners, leaving a gap between research and everyday coding practice. To address this gap, we introduce EcoAssist, an energy-aware assistant integrated into an IDE that analyzes AI-generated frontend code, estimates its energy footprint, and proposes targeted optimizations. We evaluated EcoAssist through benchmarks of 500 websites and a controlled study with 20 developers. Results show that EcoAssist reduced per-website energy by 13–16% on average, increased developers’ awareness of energy use, and maintained developer productivity. This work demonstrates how energy considerations can be embedded directly into AI-assisted coding workflows, supporting developers as they engage with energy implications through actionable feedback.

Worker-Centered Design (WCD) has gained prominence over the past decade, offering researchers and practitioners ways to engage worker agency and support collective actions for workers. Yet few studies have systematically revisited WCD itself, examining its implementations, challenges, and practical impact. Through a four-lens analytical framework that examines multiple facets of WCD within food delivery industry, we identify critical tensions and blind spots from a Multi-Laborer System perspective. Our analysis reveals conflicts across labor chains, distorted implementations of WCD, designers’ sometimes limited political-economic understanding, and workers as active agents of change. These insights further inform a Diagnostic-Generative pathway that helps to address recurring risks, including labor conflicts and institutional reframing, while cultivating designers’ policy and economic imagination. Following the design criticism tradition, and through a four-lens reflexive analysis, this study expands the action space for WCD and strengthens its relevance to real-world practice.

As populations age and technology becomes more pervasive, understanding the alignment between older adults’ values and technology design is paramount. More research is needed to understand how older adults’ living contexts shape their values and the use of technology. To address this, through a multi-context study, we explored how values differ for older adults and how their context of living might influence the adoption and use of technology. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with older adults in various residential contexts. We show that older adults tend to prioritize the same core values across living contexts, yet how they express values in each context differs. Technology can amplify or inhibit key values. We describe implications for context-responsive technology and design for continuity, to allow older adults to continually uphold important values through technology use.

In recent years, Posthuman HCI research has started exploring noticing as a method for design research that shifts focus away from anthropocentric views to embrace more entangled ecological perspectives. Through an autoethnographic freediving practice incorporating underwater photography and microphenomenological reflection, we notice how freediving can reshape our perceptions of and connections to the ocean. In this pictorial, we present freediving as a method for transcorporeal interconnectedness, which, through breathwork and sensory immersion, fosters a deeper understanding of more-than-human interactions, ultimately reflecting on designing for ecological awareness.

Temporal representations can have a socio-political impact and change how we see the world and design technologies. In this pictorial, we depart from a critique to classic representations of time that have long guided thinking in Western industrialised societies and design. Through the process of designing the More-than-Human Temporal Ontologies booklet, we describe a journey through practical engagements with the multiple ways time can be seen as created and creating more-than-human worlds. By embodying, imagining and sketching multiple expressions of more-than-human times, and by using these to appropriate, critique and expand representations of times, we propose the final outcome of the booklet as a tool for HCI and design researchers to structure dialogues and understanding of time and temporalities in more inclusive and expansive ways.

Sustainable HCI (SHCI) Researchers are increasingly attuned to environmental issues in material creation, guided by a posthumanist framework that decentres the human-maker, accounting for nonhuman agencies. Applying ‘noticing’ as a method, we sourced sea-derived matter—often dismissed as waste—to make a tangible material we call SeaFoam; to achieve this, we gathered seaweeds and oyster shells and developed methods and tools in a kitchen-laboratory makerspace. This pictorial documents a design journey that includes a Do-it-Yourself (DIY) process of agar extraction (SeaFoam's key ingredient) and explorations with oyster powder to enrich SeaFoam's texture. Through the first author's autobiographical Research through Design journalling, we reflect on the evolving relationship between human-makers and the ecologies of once-living matter and discuss their potential application in interactive artefacts. This work offers the DIS community an account of first-person methods combined with Material-Driven Methodologies to enrich the possibilities of biomaterial creations for interactive applications.

In recent years, HCI research around post-anthropocene design has been gaining traction.Caring and inclusive stances towards more-than-humans, multispecies dialogues, and decentering the human in design are imbuing HCI and other disciplines.Similarly, critical heritage scholars have pointed to the need to re-frame DIS '25,

This study presents Critter Connect Critter Connect, a wearable device fostering, multispecies relationships in natural ecosystems. Grounded in posthuman theory and More-than-Human geography, the work responds to human-centred design limitations, which often overlook non-visual and non-linguistic modes of interaction. It also highlights the need for practical tools fostering direct, place-specific, and non-hierarchical sensory-rich engagements with other beings. This pictorial shows the device's potential to enable spontaneous and embodied interactions between users and three species in a biodiversity-rich ecosystem through geolocation-based tactile and auditory feedback. We present a design process building on multispecies ethics and speculative methods to address ecological care, as well as a pilot study demonstrating Critter Connect's capacity to amplify the wearer's awareness of unseen multispecies presences and sense of connection to nature. This research contributes to HCI by offering a framework for designing ethically considerate, sensory-rich interactions with other beings, thus challenging human-centric engagement and promoting ecological cohabitation.

In this submission, I present my research on the design of technological interventions to enhance self-perceptions of aging (SPA)and the well-being of older adults in India.My work focuses on aging experiences and technology opportunities for older adults in diverse living environments in urban India.These living environments include private homes (aging in place), assisted living townships (retirement homes), and old age institutions.Through interviews, the design of an Aging Reflection Probe Kit and field engagements, I highlight key aspects of SPA among older adults.These include social presence, self-efficacy, activities, age-related transitions, life satisfaction, agency, self-value, age associations, and emotional well-being.I propose a Research through Design (RtD) approach to explore how technological interventions can operationalize SPA theories in HCI and contribute to enhancing older adults' well-being.In addition, I will examine how older adults in diverse living environments adopt and adapt these technologies and how these interventions shape their aging experiences, environments, and social networks.

Human-computer interaction (HCI) increasingly explores the role of digital games in engaging audiences with cultural heritage. While heritage games exist, few effectively integrate participatory, reflective, and speculative storytelling to bridge nature and culture. Moreover, existing methods often lack inclusivity and fail to capture the evolving perspectives on heritage. Here, we show how an iterative Research through Design (RtD) approach led to the development of the Natureculture Heritage (NCH) Game, evolving from a board game to a digital platform that fosters deep engagement with Madeira's natureculture heritage. Playtests revealed the game's ability to enhance participation, inclusivity, and speculative storytelling through mechanics such as character embodiment, multi-perspective narration, and Hero's Journey structuring. The study contributes to HCI and heritage research by demonstrating how digital storytelling games can support sustainable heritage engagement. Future directions include refining multiplayer interaction, integrating factual content, and expanding accessibility for diverse audiences.

For decades, digital technologies have been used to offer engaging experiences in cultural heritage sites, and these experiences have shown useful as a means to convey the histories associated with the sites. While some experiences are information-driven (e.g., tour guides), others are story-driven and therefore need a narrative justification for why the past and the present collide and in which way. This paper explores how narrative conventions from genre fiction – specifically, ghost stories, science fiction, historical fiction and fantasy – can frame narrative content in cultural heritage sites. We discuss these specific literary genres and their use in locative games to achieve the temporal collisions necessary for framing story-driven locative cultural heritage experiences. We identify the nature of the main temporal connections used by the different genres (including issues of narrative control) and offered a tentative mapping of the temporal connections onto an actual cultural heritage site.

This pictorial introduces Natureculture Probes, an innovative tool designed to enhance visitor engagement at heritage sites through participatory methods. Rooted in feminist post-human approaches and post-humanist HCI, these probes aim to bridge nature and culture, offering diverse perspectives on heritage. Developed through an iterative research-through-design approach, the tools include postcards and sensory maps, enabling visitors to document their reflections and sensory experiences. Field tests at two UNESCO heritage sites highlight the probes' potential to capture diverse, contextual data and foster deeper connections with nature and cultural heritage. However, tensions emerged between heritage preservation, public engagement, and technology's role in nature. The study underscores the importance of inclusive, co-designed tools to balance economic, cultural, and environmental entanglements. The findings advocate for adaptive, seasonally varied deployments to better address the diverse needs of heritage visitors and stakeholders, ultimately contributing to more empathetic and sustainable heritage site management and visitor experience design.

Despite their long-standing presence in the digital mainstream, the use of locative technologies in enhancing interaction with natural and cultural heritage invites further work, particularly relevant in addressing the human-nature disconnect characterizing the Anthropocene. In this paper, we investigate how nature walks are experienced, and how these embodied encounters with nature might inform the development of digital technologies that enhance nature walks. In examining the lived and sensory dimensions of the experience of walking nature walks, we investigate their embodied and imaginary realities and devise an organic pedagogy for developing interactive locative technologies for natural heritage that entangle human and more-than-human actors. By formulating implications for the design of organically-informed interactive tools, we contribute to a reparative HCI didactics intended to sustainably mend, and re-enchant, the compromised human-nature bond, adding depth to the understanding and appreciation of nature as a space of awe and wonder.

This pictorial presents Echo of the Abyss (EotA), a Virtual Reality (VR) experience that immerses users in a simulated deep-sea dive. EotA aims to foster a sense of connection and curiosity towards marine ecosystems by allowing players to embody a diver, guided by aquatic animals, in a safe and contemplative virtual environment. The design leverages theories from HCI, ecopsychology, and hydrocommons to promote environmental stewardship and emotional engagement with the ocean. EotA's narrative and interaction strategies are intended to overcome barriers to accessing blue spaces, providing transformative experiences that nurture empathy and ecological consciousness. Early pilot studies confirm that EotA aesthetic feel, interaction design and game mechanics can enhance human connection with remote ecosystems; further studies will investigate the long-term impact of VR experiences in Ocean conservation.

Drawing on feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) and feminist technoscience theories, this pictorial advances speculative design and fabulation through post-anthropocentric practices using visual sketching, embodied noticing, and indexing more-than-human perspectives and interactions. In a summer-long experiment, the authors engaged in visual sketching and noticed interspecies ecosystems through situated drawing, annotations, and indexing. This practice produced reflective and speculative narratives, inspiring positive fabulations within these "polyphonic assemblages." By challenging traditional human-centric design approaches, the authors embrace an "ethics of possibility" and promote inclusive, future-oriented design frameworks. This work details a novel embodied method for affirmative fabulations, envisioning inclusive speculative futures to push the boundaries of embodied design research.

Migration and technology studies increasingly recognize the importance of incorporating migrant perspectives in design processes. Speculative design methods have emerged as powerful tools for imagining alternative futures, particularly when working with marginalized communities. However, there remains a gap in understanding how to effectively engage long-term settled migrants in participatory design processes that honor their experiences and imaginative capacities. Here we show how integrating feminist care principles with speculative design methods can create more inclusive and empathetic approaches to technology design with migrant communities. Through workshops applying the ''magic machines'' methodology, we demonstrate how participatory speculation enables migrants to articulate their experiences, anxieties, and hopes for technological futures. Our findings reveal the importance of considering diasporic minds and cross-border connectivity in future technologies. This work provides immediate opportunities for researchers and designers to develop more inclusive approaches to speculative design while challenging dominant narratives about technological futures in migrant communities.

This research investigates the potential of emerging communication strategies to enhance engagement with climate change data through HCI, by recognizing the critical challenge of effectively communicating complex hyperobejcts. We designed "Finding Arcadia", an interactive artefact centred on ocean climate data, to explore how data humanism, storytelling, decentering the human in the narrative, and positive framing influence user engagement and perception of the information. Findings from a study in-the-wild (N=42) and a post-experience survey conducted six months later (N=19) foregrounds strategies to foster deeper engagement and connection with the information but also tensions in engaging with such a complex topic. We contribute to climate change communication and HCI research with the design decisions, study outcomes, and reflections on ways in which communication strategies can promote understanding and connection with a hyperobject.

HCI and design studies have increasingly identified challenges for gig workers and advocated for designs centered around worker justice. However, there’s an existing research gap in understanding how platform designers approach gig worker issues in their practice. Our study engaged ten platform designers from food delivery and ride-hailing platforms to investigate this gap. Through semi-structured interviews, we uncovered their strategies, the extent of authority and responsibilities, and the range of obstacles they encounter in influencing decision-making that could affect gig workers’ experiences with the platforms. While platform designers were aware of gig worker issues, they confronted challenges from business goals, decision-making power, policies, and job security in promoting worker well-being. We discuss the jurisdiction of platform designers and propose that HCI research should further support them, who are deeply engaged in the gig economy and have the potential to participate in addressing social justice issues.

Periodic Fable in the Wild is a gamified experience that aims to contextualise basic concepts about the Periodic Table and organic chemistry through Augmented Reality, gamification and mechanisms that integrate real-world compounds/objects within the system. The app uses a pedagogical situated learning approach allowing preteens (9 to 13 year-old) to explore physical spaces, gather atoms, and recreate chemical compounds while interacting with molecular structures. By adapting the learning content to the user’s real-world context, we aim to enhance knowledge transfer, making the experience more meaningful, relatable, and engaging.

This paper investigates the relationship between design research and humancomputer interaction (HCI) in the context of climate change communication and engagement. We discuss current practices in climate change communication and the decrease in concern and engagement caused by “crisis fatigue”. Through Research through Design (RtD), we set out to investigate data humanism and how users react to climate change data, testing approaches to improve engagement. With this purpose, we designed and evaluated Finding Arcadia, an interactive data story that uses data humanism to shift the dialogue from crisis-focused to action-focused. One study with the original IMF visualisations (N = 17) and two studies in public spaces (N = 12 and N = 64) point to the contextualization of the data and presenting actionable solutions helping in engaging users with climate change issues; help in creating solution-focused narratives and interpreting and relating with climate data. From these results, we derive insights for designing empowering interactive data visualizations for resilient climate change engagement.

Heritage is a dynamic concept, being constantly redefined by those that value it. Modern approaches to heritage bring focus to participatory processes that put communities at the centre of the heritage discourse. For migrant communities, these participatory processes can show the tension of integration versus identity, as migrants integrating into their host country can maintain, adapt or loose connections to their cultural identity. Digital storytelling platforms can offer space for exposing such tensions. In this paper, storytelling is adopted as a practice to engage three communities of migrants (with different socio-cultural contexts) on their relation to heritage. Through workshops, participants created 78 stories (accessible through a Digital Storytelling platform), which were thematically analysed. Using the concept of boundary objects, we discuss how participant's stories reflect heritage discourse and how they are entangled within the wider social, economic, and environmental context.

Interactions about climate change have been mostly focused on a negative or neutral form of communication, in line with the so-called "doom-and-gloom" narrative. However, recent research and guidelines point to the need to engage audiences in a more positive, story-focused and actionable way. In this pictorial, we describe a Data Humanism design approach formulated from its original manifesto. We present this proposal through a prototype that engages users with climate change data related to the oceans in a contextualised, personalised and action-focused way. To create this approach, we operationalised data humanism into design steps that guided the design process. Through the analysis of the applied study, we identify opportunities and challenges faced with this approach and with engaging diverse audiences "in the wild" with climate issues, guiding the design of future data humanism climate narratives through interactive data visualisations.

The gig economy and digital labor platforms, such as food delivery, have become essential while also troubling the current socioeconomic landscape. Delivery platforms promise entry-level work, flexibility, and other benefits. However, researchers remain divided on if these platforms benefit workers and society at large. This study aims to shed light on the comprehensive challenges in food delivery work, uncovering gig worker-centered design opportunities to improve the lives of food couriers. Adopting an exploratory research process, we analyzed 19 ride-along food delivery videos and performed nine semi-structured interviews with food couriers in Portugal. Our findings illustrated the complexity and challenging nature of delivery work due to the entangled physical, digital, social, natural, and human factors. We captured and discussed gig worker-centered opportunities that surfaced from work challenges, echoing the needs of food couriers about supporting work, justice, inclusion, and work vision.

This pictorial outlines findings from a field study part of an inclusive digital storytelling project, which aims to develop digital tools for migrant communities to share their lived cultural heritage (CH). The field study intended to discern migrants’ perceptions of cultural heritage through a one-week story-based photo challenge involving ten young adult migrants in Lisbon, Portugal. We analysed the data highlighting participant values and heritage meaning-making. We highlight the unfolding of cultural heritage thematics through their daily journeys in the hosting country's landscapes. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) strives to secure an inclusive and socially just impact for technology. With a focus on participants’ assets and values, results from this study point towards sensitising concepts contributing to facilitating the design of inclusive digital tools for telling of lived cultural heritage experiences of migrant communities.

As we engaged in designing digital interventions for intercultural dialogues around public cultural heritage sites, we saw an opportunity to surface multiple interpretations and points of view of history and shine a critical lens on current societal issues. To do so, we present the results of a collaborative auto-ethnography of alternative tours accompanied by intercultural guides, to explore sensory and embodied engagements with cultural heritage sites in a southern European capital. By focusing on the differences in how we experienced the heritage sites, we analyse the duality of discomfort, a common concept in HCI, in that it can both be deployed as a resource for designing systems that can transform people’s understanding of history or it can be a hindrance for engagement, having an unequal effect on individuals.

This pictorial presents Periodic Fable (PF), an educational game's design and graphic interface that promotes a constructivist approach to engage young children with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) subjects. The game presents children with scientific content supported with an exploratory activity using physical cubes manipulable through Tangible Interaction and Augmented Reality. The game's objective is to entertain children while engaging them with the basics of chemistry and the Periodic Table. We reflect upon the combination of these immersive technologies, game-play mechanics, and aesthetics geared towards conveying accurate scientific information through a ludic and entertaining approach. The quantitative and qualitative results of a study with 20 children, showed significant positive results in the participants’ learning outcomes and engagement, thereby encouraging us to continue evaluating our design system as a tool that can promote STEM Education.

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, digital technologies impact the way humans experience places and spaces in (smart) cities. To some extent, these smart technologies are intertwined with the urban living enabling the augmentation of the city’s space and creating new opportunities for playful urban engagement. Moreover, touristic cities are becoming the arena of novel hospitality services, emerging from the widespread use of digital technologies and internet-based platforms. At the same time, visitors look for increasingly “authentic” travel experiences that provide meaningful interactions with locals. New business models, such as those emerging from the sharing economy, flourished in response to these fresh needs and opportunities. However, establishing points of dialogue that bring benefits to both residents and tourists is a complex task that still needs inquiry. Here we extend on previous efforts by proposing a playful immersive experience that focuses on creating an esthetically engaging environment for direct information exchange between locals and visitors. We investigate how technology can mediate and augment such information sharing, engaging tourists in a playful and immersive experience. Results of an experiment with 15 users are analyzed and presented to provide new insights to the HCI community.

Sharing economy and contemporary tourism are two emerging concepts that urge to be investigated together with new ubiquitous and immersive technologies, in the tourism and hospitality sector. In this rich scenario, we designed and implemented ShareCities, a platform to foster remote direct information exchange and meaningful interactions among tourists and locals. Exploiting ShareCities we here present an extended analysis on the opportunity to use people-to-people recommendation criteria based on proximity. We hence defined three criteria which drove our analysis: i) profile similarity, ii) geographical proximity, and iii) random exploration. Through an online questionnaire, we collect answers from 126 young-adult students, obtaining a general positive interest in the three criteria but also concerns in terms of privacy, trust, and feeling of disorientation.

Abstract Transitioning to and through University is a delicate period for students’ well-being. Moreover, the recent COVID-19 pandemic added a further toll through the various challenges related to studying, socializing, community-building, and safety. These challenges inspired the design of a mobile application, called Tecnico GO!, to support university students’ well-being and academic performance. This paper presents the design rationale and evaluation of the app conducted during the academic year 2021-2022. Findings cluster around three themes: i) students studying needs; ii) building a sense of community; iii) gamification strategies. The discussion elaborates on the student’s perceptions of well-being during pandemics. Students’ perception of the app is positive, appreciative of the crowdsensing features, supporting learning goals, community building, and safety. On the other hand, the gamification features, as currently deployed, do not achieve the expected goals.

Current cultural policies are evolving from social inclusion (removing barriers and promoting equality for participation in culture) to social cohesion (fostering solid bonds between groups despite their differences). Digital interventions can create spaces that promote social inclusion and cohesion. In this paper, we report on the design and evaluation of a cultural heritage and digital storytelling application supporting a participatory approach to culture and hosting society. We evaluate our intervention in three marginalized communities with different social-cultural contexts: migrant women in Barcelona, a community living in a priority neighbourhood in Paris and second and third-generation migrants in Lisbon. Through an analysis of their application use, our findings point at their needs and desires, highlighting how the app can support social inclusion as the first step towards cohesion, but that these are heterogeneous concepts susceptible to nuanced appropriations by the different communities.

Anthropogenic activities damage nature in several ways. In the context of Madeira archipelago, we want to raise teenagers’ awareness about the impact that anthropogenic activities have caused on the species Monachus Monachus (Mediterranean Monk Seal). To raise awareness of the Monk Seal ecosystem among the teenage population this work proposes the design of a Visual Novel enriched with collaborative and gamification elements, called SeaStory. The main goal is to provide educational content in a more attractive and engaging format. Through the realization of a functional prototype, for the android operating system, we want to study how the use of collaborative features in interactive narratives influences the user experience and the delivery of educational content. This work presents a novel approach by adding collaborative elements in a Visual Novel providing in this way a contribution in the design of interactive media with the goal of providing awareness about endangered species and ecosystems among a teenage audience.

Children often perceive abstract concepts such as chemistry as difficult, and teachers struggle to convey content knowledge in these subjects. In this pictorial, we address the need to promote the interest for chemistry in children by developing a multi-layered Augmented Reality serious game that uses storytelling, character design and game mechanics to connect and engage young audiences with chemistry: the Periodic Fable an Augmented Journey. Our contribution relies on the design and development of the system to convey content knowledge about the Periodic Table while fostering the children's interest and challenging their possible daunting perception of the domain. After designing and implementing the game, we conducted an exploratory study using a mixed-method approach engaging 21 young participants from a public school to assess the learning gains and the role of storytelling through levels of narrative transportation. The results show positive perception and learning outcome of chemistry, narrative transportation showcasing an opportunity for a unique form to approach chemistry using an edutainment format.

Sustainable Development (SD) in its dimensions – environment, economy, and society – is a growing area of concern within the HCI community. This paper advances a systematic literature review on sustainability across the Sustainable Human-Computer Interaction (SHCI) body of work. The papers were classified according to the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework to understand how the pillars of SD play into the HCI discourse on sustainability. The economic angle was identified as a gap in SHCI literature. To meet the TBL of SD, however, a balance needs to be sought across all ‘lines’. In this paper, we propose that HCI can advance the discussion and the understanding of the economic concepts around sustainability through taking a sociology perspective on the economic angle of the TBL. We sustain this claim by discussing economic concepts and the role that digital can play in redefining the established foundations of our economic system.

Children’s independent mobility has proved to have a tremendous positive impact on their well-being, social and cognitive development, and spatial understanding. However, children’s independent mobility is declining in several countries although the increasing number of investments in urban mobility and the incentives for sustainable adoption of public transport and shared mobility. Concurrently, ownership of mobile devices is growing, opening up compelling opportunities for location- and map-based applications and services designed for and with children. This article investigates the needs and concerns in the design of child-targeted locative systems addressing children’s independent mobility while considering caregivers’ approval and fears. We present a study with seven families (nine children, 8-13-year-old, and seven adults) by taking an interdisciplinary approach. Inspired by scenario-based design, we invited the participants to imagine themselves in independent mobility scenarios (e.g., daughter and father negotiating a school path) and tell what design choices they would make. Our results indicate that the design of a child-targeted locative system should enhance physical safety on the road and enhance online safety.

Abstract In this paper, we present a systematic analysis of large-scale human mobility patterns obtained from a passive Wi-Fi tracking system, deployed across different location typologies. We have deployed a system to cover urban areas served by public transportation systems as well as very isolated and rural areas. Over 4 years, we collected 572 million data points from a total of 82 routers covering an area of 2.8 km2. In this paper we provide a systematic analysis of the data and discuss how our low-cost approach can be used to help communities and policymakers to make decisions to improve people’s mobility at high temporal and spatial resolution by inferring presence characteristics against several sources of ground truth. Also, we present an automatic classification technique that can identify location types based on collected data.

Head-Mounted Display based Virtual Reality is proliferating. However, Visually Induced Motion Sickness (VIMS), which prevents many from using VR without discomfort, bars widespread adoption. Prior work has shown that limiting the Field of View (FoV) can reduce VIMS at a cost of also reducing presence. Systems that dynamically adjust a user’s FoV may be able to balance these concerns. To explore this idea, we present a technique for standard 360° video that shrinks FoVs only during VIMS inducing scenes. It uses Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping and peripheral optical flow to compute camera movements and reduces FoV during rapid motion or optical flow. A user study (N=23) comparing 360° video with unrestricted-FoVs (90°), reduced fixed-FoVs (40°) and dynamic-FoVs (40°-90°) revealed that dynamic-FoVs mitigate VIMS while maintaining presence. We close by discussing the user experience of dynamic-FoVs and recommendations for how they can help make VR comfortable and immersive for all.

Abstract Transmedia Stories are becoming an increasingly important technique for the tourism industry. They are successful tools to engage, inspire and gather audiences online and offline. In this article, we describe the design, implementation and evaluation of Fragments of Laura, a bespoke Transmedia Storytelling (TS) experience designed to involve visitors in developing knowledge and awareness about the cultural and natural heritage of Madeira Island. Fragments of Laura (FoL) is composed of two interconnected components: a Location-Aware Multimedia Story, and a Hypermedia Platform populated with locally collected testimonies and interviews. Results from the extensive evaluation of Fragments of Laura, highlights the potential of interactive multimedia, TS in particular, in engaging tourists with the destination values and community. Our contribution is twofold, on one hand we extend on the state of the art of multimedia interactive storytelling, with the description of the Fragments of Laura TS artifact. On the other hand, results from FoL evaluation highlight how the artifact impacts on the tourism experience its implications for the design of future tourism driven TS experiences.

In this paper, we present design implications for the creation of digital maps in the context of wayfinding systems for children. In the process, we engaged 70 children in drawing the cognitive maps of their journey from home to school. Conducted in 2017, the study involved fifth-grade students (9-12 years old), at three different public schools in Funchal, Portugal. This paper offers reflections on their drawings and the resulting implications for the design of geographic technologies for children. Our contribution consists in highlighting ten types of landmarks extracted from children's 'maps' clustered into four categories, namely: Newness, Cultural personalization, Infrastructure, and Natural Landscapes.

In this article, we report on findings from an empirical study designed to assess factors determining the experience of immersion in desktop-based web-browsing, which is identified as occurring when a user reports a deep sense of cognitive and perceptual absorption in the content and/or the interaction with a website. A within-subjects study was designed and administered to participants (N = 29) who interacted with three different websites. Results of the self-report measure have been factor analyzed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The PCA yielded three factors (media form and content; control and continuity; consistency), which appear to influence the determinants of an immersive experience, namely vividness and interactivity, in different ways. Directions for further research are briefly discussed.

The paper presents a participatory platform designed and implemented with the aim of fostering dialogue between locals and tourists. The platform exploits the crowd-sourcing paradigm to collect the voice of the locals in order to provide tourists with authentic experiences. The system was designed as an immersive visual storytelling experience, to let the user discover the locals' story in an interactive rich environment. The insights that emerged during a preliminary evaluation with users point out that the system is able to deepen the relationship between locals and tourists while interacting with the platform.

Teenagers' engagement in museums is much talked about but little research has been done to understand their behavior and inform design. Findings from co-design sessions with teenagers suggested they value games and stories when thinking about enjoyable museum tours. Informed by these findings and working with a natural history museum, we designed: a story-based tour (Turning Point) and a game-based tour (Haunted Encounters), informed by similar content. The two strategies were evaluated with 78 teenagers (15-19 years old) visiting the museum as part of an educational school trip. We assessed teenagers' personality in class; qualitative and quantitative data on their engagement, experience, and usability of the apps were collected at the museum. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative data show personality traits mapping into different behaviors. We offer implications for the design of museum apps targeted to teenagers, a group known as difficult to reach.

In this paper, we present a real-world study where a community-based tracking infrastructure has been put to good use for understanding human mobility during the COVID-19 outbreak, in order to contrast its diffusion. In particular, the infrastructure, deployed in 81 points of interests (POIs) across the Madeira Islands (Portugal), can collect a massive amount of spatio-temporal data, that can be enriched with potentially independent data sources of additional values (such as the official number of people affected by the coronavirus disease), and crowdsourced data collected by citizens. These enriched hyper-local data can be manipulated to provide i) stakeholders with a visual tool to contrast COVID-19 diffusion through human mobility monitoring, and ii) citizens with an interactive tool to visualize, in real-time, how crowded is a POI and plan their daily activities, and contribute to the data acquisition. Here we present the deployed community-based infrastructure and the data visualization interactive web application, designed to extract meaningful information from human mobility data during the COVID-19 outbreak.

Visually Induced Motion Sickness (VIMS), when the visual system detects motion that is not felt by the vestibular system, is a deterrent for first-time Virtual Reality (VR) users and can impact its adoption rate. Constricting the field-of-view (FoV) has been shown to reduce VIMS as it conceals optical flow in peripheral vision, which is more sensitive to motion. Additionally, several studies have suggested the inclusion of visual elements (e.g., grids) consistent with the real world as reference points. In this paper, we describe a novel technique dynamically controlled by a video’s precomputed optical flow and participants’ runtime head direction and evaluate it in a within-subjects study (N = 24) on a 360° video of a roller coaster. Furthermore, based on a detailed analysis of the video and participant’s experience, we provide insights on the effectiveness of the techniques in VIMS reduction and discuss the role of optical flow in the design and evaluation of the study.

While HCI remains vastly abundant in human- and land- centric applications, in this work we focus on exploring further the Human Computer Biosphere Interaction (HCBI) concept in aquatic settings. Based on the existing techniques for prototyping the geodesic domes, we design them as five marine megafauna species, for the on- and off- shore locations. We describe novel interaction concepts with and within such structures: (i) Turtle AR nesting, (ii) Bird XR watching, (iii) Dolphin acoustic swimming, (iv) Seal night scuba-diving, and (v) Whale projection mapping. We report the design of such interaquatic environments, focused at depicting the ongoing concerns with such marina megafauna species, discussing their feasibility, suggesting research, implementation and validation for all interaquatic domes, planned in our future work.

Newly emerging urban IoT infrastructures are enabling novel ways of sensing how urban spaces are being used. However, the data produced by these systems are largely context-agnostic, making it difficult to discern what patterns and anomalies in the data mean. We propose a hybrid data approach that combines the quantitative data collected from an urban IoT sensing infrastructure with qualitative data contributed by people answering specific kinds of questions in situ. We developed a public installation, Roam-io, to entice and encourage the public to walk-up and answer questions to suggest what the data might represent and enrich it with subjective observations. The findings from an in the wild study on the island of Madeira showed that many passers-by stopped and interacted with Roam-io and attempted to make sense of the data and contribute in situ observations.

Inspired by HCI research advocating for the inclusion of children in the design process, this pictorial provides a qualitative case study on children's perceptions of urban landscapes. Our goal is to create digital maps in the context of locative systems and wayfinding for children. For this purpose, we engaged 70 students from the city of Funchal (Portugal) in the drawing of a cognitive map of their journey from home to school in the Fall of 2017. These children (9-12 years old) also replied to a brief survey, and 31 out of 70 responded to a face-to-face interview in the Spring of 2018. This pictorial offers an analysis of the drawings as well as providing highlights of the children's own account of their maps. Our work generates a set of 10 themes related to landmarks and design ideas for the creation of digital maps for children.

This pictorial summarizes a qualitative study of children's perceptions of mobility through their own cognitive map drawings of the journey from home to school. We engaged 27 sixth-grade students (11 to 12 year-old) from Lisbon, Portugal, and analyze their drawings extracting 12 different design recommendations. We use these recommendations to provide design suggestions in terms of i) existing functionalities of mapping applications (that can be re-used); ii) improvements for existing map and wayfinding systems; iii) children's original design suggestions. The qualitative study reported here provides contributions that could help promote sustainable mobility for children in particular, with regards to innovation but also autonomy and supervision by caregivers.

Orientation is an emerging issue in cinematic Virtual Reality (VR), as viewers may fail in locating points of interest. Recent strategies to tackle this research problem have investigated the role of cues, specifically diegetic sound effects. In this paper, we examine the use of sound spatialization for orientation purposes, namely by studying different spatialization conditions ("none", "partial", and "full" spatial manipulation) of multitrack soundtracks. We performed a between-subject mixed-methods study with 36 participants, aided by Cue Control, a tool we developed for dynamic spatial sound editing and data collection/analysis. Based on existing literature on orientation cues in 360º and theories on human listening, we discuss situations in which the spatialization was more effective (namely, "full" spatial manipulation both when using only music and when combining music and diegetic effects), and how this can be used by creators of 360º videos.

Recent years demonstrate an increased interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) applications when studying cetaceans. However, they remain expensive underwater systems and targeted for industrial and military purposes. While the usage of smartphones as acoustic sensors has been observed in terrestrial environments, ocean and nautical PAM applications remain greatly unexplored. This paper presents the design, deployment and testing of a POSEIDON system, used for real-time augmentation of whale-watching experiences. We collect and use cetaceans' vocal call acoustic samples (clicks, moans and whistles) and apply machine learning for offline model training and prediction. When discriminating the calls, we find that Extra Trees and Gradient Boosting outperform other classifiers (>0.95 confidence threshold). Collected samples are at disposal to citizen scientists and marine biologists. Future studies involve real-time on-boat user testing.

In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of Watt-I-See (WISE), a tangible interactive installation aimed at probing awareness in two target audiences (children and adults) about renewable energy resources that could inform eco-feedforward strategies. Our system combines a tangible interface representing five different energy sources, with a set of Lego™ blocks used to manipulate different weather conditions that affect the available energy mix. Through the evaluation of WISE, our main goal was to expose users to the effort necessary to produce the energy used in our day-to-day lives. We evaluated the installation separately for children and adults. The focus on children was due to their importance in the overall household consumption and their role in future scenarios where consumers will have to adapt to the availability of renewable energy sources. The focus on adults was to observe the impact of such information in their decision making regarding their routines. Our findings highlight the success of the interface in engaging children and adults, creating awareness between weather conditions and energy production and the fossil-fuel energy baseline in the grid. Overall, the study highlights the importance of providing a close point-of-interaction feedback as it enables a better understanding of energy-related decisions, reactions, and availability of resources.

The widespread popularity of Pokémon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pokémon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pokémon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pokémon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pokémon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pokémon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pokémon GO may be counteracted.

This paper investigates whether location and medium affect the experience of interactive storytelling in the context of mobile Virtual Reality systems. For this purpose, we discuss the development of Fragments of Laura, a location-aware multimedia application in a larger interactive transmedia story, where users can view a 360° narrative in a 3D environment. We conducted a user study with the intention of measuring Presence, Flow and Narrative Transportation and evaluate four scenarios resulting from the combination of two independent variables - location (existence and absence of links between the test location and the narrative location) and medium (tablet and mobile virtual reality with smartphones). Our results show that the user experience while watching a narrative fluctuates depending on the location where is viewed and the device in which is viewed. Locations linked with the content lead to a significantly increased Flow, Presence, and Narrative Transportation.

As 360° immersive Mobile Virtual Reality (MVR) experiences are reaching a wider public, thanks to inexpensive and more powerful mobile technology available on the shelves, it is also rapidly growing as a research arena to investigate how to best design such VR experiences. Adding to this research direction, in this paper we report on an exploratory study designed to evaluate users perception in "Fragments of Laura", a mobile location-aware storytelling experience that uses MVR in a public setting. Results from the study encourage us to pursuit investigation as the experience was well received by the participants and provided an enjoyable experience, however, we discovered that there are still design challenges to overcome in order for MVR to be widely adopted within a public setting. Such as, finding the balance between multimedia and immersive multimedia, providing an "onboarding" time for such media and proper locations for the content consumption.

Location-based services, narratives and interactive experiences have a substantial tradition in human–computer interaction. Building on this background, we report the iterative design process, prototyping and evaluation of Seven Stories, a location-based narrative experience. The design includes two novel features that aim to link the user experience more closely to its physical context: visual markers scanning and a narrator. We have evaluated Seven Stories with two studies. Study 1, with 12 participants, was conducted using qualitative methods to assess the overall user experience. Study 2, with 21 participants, was conducted using quantitative methods, to evaluate the role of the markers and narrator as specific design features. Our contribution is to illustrate, through both qualitative and quantitative findings, how these two novel features influence the user experience, and what implications they have for design.

In this paper we present a study through which we intended to understand children's preference towards book formats, in particular digital or paper ones. To accomplish this, we created an original story (Ritinha) illustrated by two children. The traditional book format was composed by static images and text. The digital format had animated images, hyperlinks to navigate to different parts of the story and static text complemented by an audio narrative. We conducted a field study with 105 children in order to observe in which format children would prefer to read a book: if in paper or in digital format. The method used to accomplish this task was direct observation.

Crescendo is an ongoing project aimed to provide children with High Functioning Autism, their teachers and carers with a communication tool that bridges them. Crescendo guides carers in teaching and immersing their child in a virtual environment that mimics the real world, helping them to make sense of it and interact with objects and places in order to become self-reliant in atomized, step-by-step routines. Crescendo is a two-sided app design, one for carers and another for children. It provides both with tool for monitoring and incremental step-by-step learning.

This paper describes a tangible visualization that explores the link between the impact of energy feedback on household consumers and the resource demand impact on energy production. Specifically, it positions a novel perspective attempting to move beyond the known limitations of current eco-feedback systems and contributes to enhance our understanding of how consumers comprehend energy production. The work is informed by a comprehensive study of an installation that displays the ratio of current power generation sources and the percentage of grid renewables. The paper provides design insights for creating novel eco-feedback visualizations that leverage the balance between user lifestyles and the desire to influence consumption behaviors and practices. Evaluation results show an increase in energy literacy and awareness as well as identifies high consumer preferences towards simple, representative interfaces and ubiquitous immediate feedback. Our study shows potential in terms of future scenarios for eco-feedback in distributed energy micro-generation and other inevitable disruptive changes for the energy utility.

In this paper we present Lucid Peninsula, an interactive installation designed to immerse participants in a dreamlike, post-apocalyptic story world. The goal of the installation is to offer a way for people to experience the future through a physical interactive installation. To achieve this aim we designed and developed the interactive DreamScope device, while the Time's Up collective designed and built the physical installation. On one side with the Dreamviewer binoculars users will be able to see the world outside and absorb data relating to factors such as air quality, presence of plant and other life forms, etc. On the other side of the installation, the audience will be able to borrow mobile devices (Dreamcatchers) and venture into the actual landscape of the city, in order to "catch" the dreams of the inhabitants of the peninsula, which are mixed with memories of the world before it was transformed.

Measuring children's behaviors and experiences has been one of the core interests of the field of Child-Computer Interaction. However, maintaining children's engagement in the evaluation process is one of the challenges that researchers need to meet. In this paper we introduce Playful Booth, a system that aimed at engaging children in playful photo taking practices with the goal of capturing their social interactions over prolonged periods of time. We then present a 4-week-long deployment of Playful Booth with a total of seventy children that aimed at addressing three research questions. First, does playful booth create initial engagement on children and does it sustain this engagement over prolonged periods of time? Second, can the deployment be sustained for prolonged periods of time with minimal resources? Last, do behavioral data as captured from playful booth reflect children's actual social participation in the school community?

This paper explores uses and gratifications of a content community on a social network service - a music video sharing group on Facebook. In a two-stage study, 20 users first generated words or phrases to describe how they used the group, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 34 questionnaire items that were then completed by 57 new participants. Factor analysis on this data revealed four gratifications: contribution; discovery; social interaction and entertainment. These factors are interpreted and discussed, leading to design implications and guidelines aimed at informing the design of future online services that combine media sharing with social interaction to create online systems based on a rich and meaningful object-centered sociality.

With the increasing sophistication of mobile computing, a growing interest has been paid to locative media that aim at providing immersive experiences. Location aware narratives are a particular kind of locative media that aim at “telling stories that unfold in real space”. This paper presents a study that aimed at assessing an underlying hypothesis of location-aware narratives: that the coupling between the physical space and the narrative will result in increased levels of immersion in the narrative. Forty-five individuals experienced a location-aware video narrative in three locations: (a) the original location that contains physical cues from the narrative world, (b) a different location that yet portrays a similar atmosphere, and (c) a location that contains neither physical cues nor a similar atmosphere. Significant differences were found in users’ experiences with the narrative in terms of immersion in the story and mental imagery, but not with regard to feelings of presence, emotional involvement or the memorability of story elements. We reflect on these findings and the implications for the design of location-aware narratives and highlight questions for further research.

This paper describes several art based eco-feedback concepts conceived around the potential of emotional attachment between people and the natural environment. Starting from a sensor-infrastructure that looks at how families consume electricity in their homes, we investigate several artistic visualizations of the Madeiran local landscapes exploring the connection between families and elements of the endemic laurel forest. The approach described here leverages digital art as a means to go beyond traditional eco-feedback technology. By coupling people and the forest landscapes we intend to narrow the physical, temporal and psychological gaps between our everyday actions and nature. We explore how people can build a direct emotional connection between their daily energy consumption and the impact on the natural environment (such as climate change and related forest fires, mudslides, desertification and erosion).

iLand is a technology enhanced location aware narrative experience that captures and exposes the rich oral culture and traditions in the Island of Madeira for a wide variety of audience in particular foreigners and tourists. Using the Madeira main city, Funchal, as a setting to bring a new level of engagement of the audience with the old part of the city and its traditional stories. With this aim in mind we designed an immersive experience in the old part of the city were the local settings and its tangible details merge with the story world and events. As the experience unfolds the audience is taken deeper into the local traditions as well as into the old part of the city. In order to achieve this we designed and produced a series of short stories carefully distributed in the real space. The experience is mediated through the Placeware location aware mobile story platform [1] to functions as a tangible interface between the local stories and architectural setting and its audience.