Group snacking contexts are typically unstructured and frequently associated with the consumption of snack product FMCGs (fast-moving consumer goods). Snacks are generally low value, shared and potentially over consumed. To explore the potential of digital interventions to playfully elevate the value of these snacks, we created a sharing snack bowl technology probe embedding simple game mechanics to track individual turns for taking a snack. This paper presents both in-lab and home studies where participants used the snack bowl whilst simultaneously playing a quiz card game. Findings from thematic analysis revealed how the snack bowl elicited togetherness, reflection, and social pressure whilst also disrupting group snacking habits. Our contributions include implications for reconfiguring snacking and enhancing the value of low-cost FMCGs through ludic design elements, and augmenting everyday tangible objects for use in group settings.

We report on a six-year collaboration with a small community organisation to develop and deploy a permanent physical / digital locative media experience as part on an ongoing community regeneration project. We describe how this unfolded over four phases: approach and pilot; public deployment; supporting subsequent community-led spin-off experiences; and planning legacy and technology handovers. The project was distinctive for being a Knowledge Exchange project in which we were approached and formally contracted by the community to deliver the digital technology, rather than instigating and leading a research project. We identify seven considerations for handing over technologies that combine both digital and physical elements to communities of stakeholders that encompass businesses, councils, and volunteers, and how this illuminates the unique strengths and weaknesses of Knowledge Exchange projects within the wider design research landscape.

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.

Gifting is socially and economically important. Studies of gifting physical objects have revealed motivations, values, and the tensions between them, while HCI research has revealed weaknesses of digital gifting and explored possibilities of hybrid gifting. We report an “in the wild” study of a hybrid chocolate gift deployed as a commercial product. Interviews reveal the experiences of receivers and givers, as well as the producer's friction points and tangible benefits. We reveal how in hybrid gifts the digital elevates the physical while the physical grounds the digital. We discuss how hybrid gifts bridge the tension between receiver-preference and relationship-signalling motivations, the need to further strengthen the exchange and reveal stages of hybrid gifting, and to manage the privacy of sensitive personal messages. We propose to extend the concept of hybrid wrapping to include a finer-grained interleaving of digital into complex packaging and multi-layered wrappings to create more holistic gifting experiences.

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.

We explore how the convergence of the digital and physical into hybrid products leads to new possibilities for customization. We report on a technology probe, a hybrid advent calendar with both paper form and digital layers of content, both of which were designed to be customizable. We reveal how over two hundred active users adapted its physical and digital aspects in various ways, some anticipated and familiar, but others surprising. This leads us to contribute concepts to help understand and design for hybrid customization -- the idea of broad customization spanning physical and digital; end-to-end customization by different stakeholders along the value chain for a product; and the combination of these into customization maps.

As locative media and augmented reality spread into the everyday world so it becomes important to create aesthetic visual markers at scale. We explore a designer-centred approach in which skilled designers handcraft seed designs that are automatically recombined to create many markers as subtle variants of a common theme. First, we extend the d-touch topological approach to creating visual markers that has previously been shown to support creative design with two new techniques: area order codes and visual checksums. We then show how the topological structure of such markers provides the basis for recombining designs to generate many variations. We demonstrate our approach through the creation of beautiful, personalized and interactive wallpaper. We reflect on how technologies must enable designers to balance goals of scalability, aesthetics and reliability in creating beautiful interactive decoration.

We explore the crafting of interactive decoration for everyday artefacts. This involves adorning them with decorative patterns that enhance their beauty while triggering digital interactions when scanned with cameras. These are realized using an existing augmented reality technique that embeds computer readable codes into the topological structures of hand-drawn patterns. We describe a research through design process that engaged artisans to craft a portfolio of interactive artefacts, including ceramic bowls, embroidered gift cards, fabric souvenirs, and an acoustic guitar. We annotate this portfolio with reflections on the crafting process, revealing how artisans addressed pattern, materials, form and function, and digital mappings throughout their craft process. Further reflection on our portfolio reveals how they bridged between human and system perceptions of visual patterns and engaged in a deep embedding of digital interactions into physical materials. Our findings demonstrate the potential for interactive decoration, distilling the craft knowledge involved in creating aesthetic and functional decoration, highlight the need for transparent computer vision technologies, and raise wider issues for HCI’s growing engagement with craft.

We present a research-through-design exploration of transforming large-scale public illustrations into interactive media. We collaborated with creative practitioners to extend an existing visual marker technology to support spatial and layered interaction with wall-sized images. We document how these techniques were used to design interactive illustrations and how visitors to an exhibition engaged with these. We conclude that it is feasible to combine spatial and layered interactions to attach complex narratives to public illustrations, and highlight challenges around instruction giving, sociality and repeat experiences.

We explore the idea of making aesthetic decorative patterns that contain multiple visual codes. We chart an iterative collaboration with ceramic designers and a restaurant to refine a recognition technology to work reliably on ceramics, produce a pattern book of designs, and prototype sets of tableware and a mobile app to enhance a dining experience. We document how the designers learned to work with and creatively exploit the technology, enriching their patterns with embellishments and backgrounds and developing strategies for embedding codes into complex designs. We discuss the potential and challenges of interacting with such patterns. We argue for a transition from designing 'codes to patterns' that reflects the skills of designers alongside the development of new technologies.