Digital monetary gifts are a promising way to maintain relationships across distance. Different online platforms already enable the transmission of digital gift cards or amounts of money. However, money as a gift can face restrictions in its conveyance of personal messages, is often considered inappropriate for intimate relationships, and may elicit awkwardness. In this study we implemented three digital gifting concept prototypes that explored ways of wrapping digital money and tested their experience with 20 German participants from a recipient perspective. We applied a thematic analysis focusing on how the design could impact the perception of money. The wrapping could show thoughtfulness, add enjoyment, communicate intention, and lead to a feeling of money as ‘in the background’. Sometimes the addition of decorative and personal elements as a wrapping did not feel very connected to the money gift itself. It is recommended to specially design or restrict the recipient’s spending process.

Despite the prevalence of digital gifting, designing meaningful and emotionally engaging digital gifts remains a challenge. One promising approach is Hybrid gifting, which combines digital and physical elements to improve the perceived value of gifts and provide opportunities for interpersonalisation. However, there is limited understanding of how hybridity shapes the dynamics of gifting in everyday contexts. To explore this, we developed a connected coffee machine prototype as a technology probe to study how givers personalise hybrid gifts and how recipients experience them. A study with seven pairs in intimate relationships revealed key insights: hybridity fosters slow, deliberate engagement; supports personalisation aligned with daily routines; grants recipients autonomy in receiving gifts; and reveals tensions between giver anxiety and recipient enjoyment. We discuss design implications for hybrid gifting systems that encourage recipients to savour digital gifts through slow, reflective interactions.

This workshop uses the outputs of a two-year Research through Design project as a springboard for bringing together a community of researchers interested in Hybrid Gifting. We have discovered that the many creative and socio-psychological processes involved in choosing or making a gift inform a great deal about interactions with common digital technologies, especially when they are used to make a hybrid gift with both physical and digital components. This workshop will be a temporally extended opportunity to experience the full cycle of giving and receiving gifts, whether you use our outputs or prototypes or your own ideas, artworks, or design fictions. Let’s take this opportunity to use our research to celebrate and care for each other, and perhaps envision new ways of celebrating and caring for others.

Abstract This paper presents findings from the deployment of a technology probe—the connected shower—and implications for the development of ‘living services’ or autonomous context-aware consumer-oriented IoT services that exploit sensing to gain consumer ‘insight’ and drive personalised service innovation. It contributes to the literature on water sustainability and the potential role and barriers to the adoption of smart showers in domestic life. It also contributes to our understanding of context, which enables user activity to be discriminated and elaborated thereby furnishing the ‘insight’ living services require for their successful operation. Problematically, however, our study shows that context is not a property of sensor data. Rather than provide contextual insights into showering, the sensor data requires contextualisation to discriminate and elaborate user activity. Thus, in addition to examining the potential of the connected shower in everyday life, we consider how sensor data is contextualised through the doing of data work and the relevance of its interactional accomplishment and organisation to the design of living services.

Hybrid gifting combines physical artefacts and experiences with digital interactivity to generate new kinds of gifts. Our review details how gifting is a complex social phenomenon and how digital gifting is less engaging than physical gifting for both givers and receivers. Employing a Research Through Design approach, we developed a portfolio of four hybrid gifting experiences: an augmented advent calendar; edible music tracks; personalized museum tours; and a narrated city walk. Our reflection addresses three concepts: hybrid wrapping where physical gifts become wrapped in digital media and vice versa; the importance of effortful interactions that are visible and pleasurable; and the need to consider social obligation, including opportunities for acknowledgement and reciprocation, dealing with embarrassment, and recognizing the distinction between giving and sharing. Our concepts provide guidance to practitioners who wish to design future gifting experiences while helping HCI researchers engage with the concept of gifting in a nuanced way.

The experience of sound may be seen as fleeting or ephemeral, as it naturally disperses through space in waveforms unless recorded by media. We designed muRedder to reinstate the ephemerality of sound by shredding a song ticket that embeds a sound source while playing the song simultaneously. In this study, we explored ordinary music listening activities by turning intangible music content into tangible artefacts, making the music unable to be replayed, and representing the sound-fading process by shredding the ticket. We conducted a field study with 10 participants over seven days. The results showed that muRedder enabled users to focus solely on the music content and to actively find times to enjoy the music. We also found that limitedness of the media draws prudent decision in selecting music. By showing the process of consuming the invisible auditory content in a way that is tangibly perceivable, our findings imply new value for slow consumption of digital content and musical participation in public spaces.

A myriad of digital artifacts are routinely exchanged online. While previous studies suggest that these are sometimes considered to be gifts, CSCW has largely overlooked explicit digital gifting where people deliberately choose to give digital media as gifts. We present an interview study that systematically analyzes the nature of digital gifting in comparison to conventional physical gifting. A five-stage gift exchange model, synthesized from the literature, frames this study. Findings reveal that there are distinctive gaps in people's engagement with the digital gifting process compared to physical gifting. Participants' accounts show how digital gifts often involve less labor, are sometimes not perceived as gifts by the recipient and are rarely reflected on and reciprocated. We conclude by drawing out design implications for digital gifting services and rituals.

This paper introduces FugaciousFilm, a soap film based touch display, as a platform for Attentive Interaction that encourages the user to be highly focused throughout the use of the interface. Previous work on ephemeral user interfaces has primarily focused on the development of ambient and peripheral displays. In contrast, FugaciousFilm is an ephemeral display that aims to promote highly attentive interaction. We present the iterative process of developing this interface, spanning technical explorations, prototyping and a user study. We report lessons learnt when designing the interface; ranging from the soap film mixture to the impact of frames and apertures. We then describe developing the touch, push, pull and pop interactions. Our user study shows how FugaciousFilm led to focused and attentive interactions during a tournament of enhanced Tic-Tac-Toe. We then finish by discussing how the principles of vulnerability and delicacy can motivate the design of attentive ephemeral interfaces.

This paper proposes Reverse Tangible Interaction Design for the design of tangible artifacts by attempting to adopt conventional digital interactions. This includes behavior of pixels on a screen and touch screen interfaces which have no natural physical equivalents. I introduce two design approaches that led from conceptual models tangled with our interaction with digital materials. The first design approach leads to developing physical equivalents of behavioral interactions we generally apply on digital materials. The other path tries to transform sensual features of digital materials into tangible embedded interactive systems. As part of an exploratory design process, I conducted a focus group workshop with a wide range of HCI researchers. A number of physical prototypes that replicate the digital interactions were introduced in the workshop. Participants envisioned the potential of extending the design concept for future tangible interaction design.

We present an air-contained display medium that can be directly deformed and spatially moved by various physical interaction techniques for interactive games. We first investigated familiar objects in our everyday lives that allow users to easily anticipate the idea of exertion interaction. We then introduce a novel concept of interactive medium, dubbed Inflated Roly-Poly, which consists of an inflated body with a roly-poly structure. This device receives physical input, provides passive haptic feedback and allows spatial interaction. We discuss a number of interaction techniques with game applications on Inflated Roly-Poly that presents an engaging experience through full-body interaction. Finally, we conducted an experience workshop with four participants. The workshop proved that an inflated screen coupled with a roly-poly structure exceeds the capabilities of the rigid touch screens in terms of engagement in physical interaction.