Distant pet owners suffer from negative feelings such as distress or anxiety when separating from their pet dogs. Informed by prior work on facilitating intimacy between distant couples and among distant family members, we present the design and evaluation of the cAMpanion ambient display to enhance distant owner’s sense of connectedness with their pet dogs. cAMpanion shows three statuses of pet dogs via different light colors in real-time enabled by sensor modules installed in pet dog’s living environment. We examined the impact and effectiveness of cAMpanion via a 14-day field study using mixed methods research. Our qualitative data suggested that cAMpanion helped raise awareness, while quantitative results indicated statistically significant decrease in owners’ negative emotions and increase in their perceived closeness. We discussed both advantages and limitations of cAMpanion from distant owners’ perspective, and provided implications for future researchers who would like to design similar display to enhance human-animal connectedness.

EcoSanté is a mobile lifestyle intervention that encourages individual behavior change while also helping participants understand the deep connections between daily lifestyle choices and our collective impact on the planet. Informed by research on “small” intervention approaches, we sent participants daily behavioral challenges that demonstrated connections between personal health and environmental impact at large. Through a 20-day mobile intervention study, 139 participants uploaded 1,920 submissions documenting their attempts to engage in these challenges. We found that participants’ self-reported healthy eating behavior and general self-efficacy improved significantly immediately after the intervention. Moreover, 30 days after the intervention, participants’ self-reported eating, exercise, and general self-efficacy all significantly improved compared to the beginning of the study. Participants had a more negative reaction when being asked to come up with their own challenges. Based on quantitative and qualitative findings, we provide implications for future researcher on mobile behavior intervention research.

HCI researchers increasingly involve plants in their interaction design research, such as using plants as novel interfaces or sensors. While research involving other living entities, namely humans and animals is regulated, there exists no guidance for plants involved in HCI research. Motivated by biocentric philosophy, the present article makes a first attempt at addressing this gap. Commencing with a review of the development of research ethics, we show that as ethical concern has expanded from humans to animals, there is an argument for its expansion to plants. Through the lens of Respect for Nature, we then review the state-of-the-art in HCI design research involving plants. Our focus lies with ethics in the process of conducting research and its implications for the plants involved. We derive a set of actionable ethical design considerations for researchers involving plants in their interaction design work. Finally, our work aims to stimulate discussion on the involvement of plants in interaction design research.

Music-to-visual style transfer is a challenging yet important cross-modal learning problem in the practice of creativity. Its major difference from the traditional image style transfer problem is that the style information is provided by music rather than images. Assuming that musical features can be properly mapped to visual contents through semantic links between the two domains, we solve the music-to-visual style transfer problem in two steps: music visualization and style transfer. The music visualization network utilizes an encoder-generator architecture with a conditional generative adversarial network to generate image-based music representations from music data. This network is integrated with an image style transfer method to accomplish the style transfer process. Experiments are conducted on WikiArt-IMSLP, a newly compiled dataset including Western music recordings and paintings listed by decades. By utilizing such a label to learn the semantic connection between paintings and music, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate diverse image style representations from a music piece, and these representations can unveil certain art forms of the same era. Subjective testing results also emphasize the role of the era label in improving the perceptual quality on the compatibility between music and visual content.

Hemodialysis is life-saving therapy for end-stage renal disease; yet, 20% of hemodialysis sessions are complicated by intradialytic hypotension ("IDH"). There is a need for approaches to preventing IDH that account for their implementation contexts. Using Activity Theory, we outline the design of a digital diagnostic checklist to identify patients at risk of IDH. Checklists were chosen a priori as an outcome due to prior evidence of effectiveness. Drawing on individual interviews with 20 clinicians and three focus groups with 17 patients, we describe four activity systems within hemodialysis care. We then outline a novel design process that includes co-design activities with clinicians, and four rapid-cycle iterations that progressively incorporated activity system elements into checklist design. We contribute a new type of checklist design to HCI: one that supports diagnostic thinking rather than consistent task completion. We further broaden checklist design by including a formal role for patients in checklist completion.

Energy Diet is a design concept for a digital bathroom scale that displays personal health information in the form of body weight alongside environmental health information in the form of carbon weight. We intentionally conflate these two types of feedback in an effort to encourage people to regularly monitor their energy use as they weigh themselves and to reflect on the complex relationships between personal health and environmental health. To inform our design we tested paper prototypes and administered two surveys with 500 participants. We then created a working prototype that we deployed in four participants' homes for one month each. This paper discusses findings and design implications from our surveys and in-home deployment. Overall, seeing carbon weight together with body weight on a scale helped participants to conceptualize energy consumption and to reflect on a range of daily activities and their environmental impacts.

This paper explores the use of a guessability study to examine child-defined gestures with Kinect. Applying a Wizard-of-Oz approach, gestures were elicited from six children (age 3--8) through a series of 22 task stimuli including object manipulation, navigation-based tasks, and spatial interaction. Gestures were video recorded, transcribed, and coded by three researchers employing an inductive, qualitative method of analysis. Five themes emerged from the data: (1) the influence of 2D touchscreens on children's interactions in 3D, (2) the role of contextual cues in designing a stimuli set, (3) individual preferences for dominant styles of interaction, (4) different approaches children employ to simulate the same object path, and (5) and allocentric versus egocentric approaches for manipulating objects on screen. While we did not achieve strong consensus among all of the gestures produced by children in our study, our results provide a basis for further refinement of the stimulus set and methodology used for future work examining child-defined gestures for whole-body interfaces.