This article takes a design-driven human-centred approach to Facial Recognition Technology (FRT). In a process of Research through Design, we first generated 120 ways to dodge face recognition, then distilled and tested 50 concepts in the lab. The 19 disguises that successfully bypasses FRT informed the implementation of seven disguises initially tested with 14 white participants walking through a hall, a corridor and a control gate. The control gate led to a larger study (39 participants of different ethnicities) to assess the effectiveness of the disguises in bypassing three open source FR models using three different distance metrics and four backends. We compare our real-life evaluation of design-generated disguises against previous and current computing research: while maliciously crafted digital perturbation attacks work well, they do not capture the complexity of live FRT opening up opportunities for future research.

Jewellers’ participation in interaction design is scarce, yet the creativity of jewellers could add value as they interpret materials and mediate personal connections in poetic ways. We investigate how to empower jewellers to experiment with the possibilities that physical computing offers to their practice. This paper presents the making of a Digital Jewellery Kit, a composite of pre-assembled circuitry, used by second-year BA jewellery students during a 10-week project which brought together theory and practice. Drawing on students’ reflective accounts, we discuss what made the jewellers’ path into physical computing more meaningful to their practice, what type of artefacts they created with electronics as well as what values drove their creative process. We offer design recommendations on how to support the praxes of jewellers whilst allowing their creativity to grow through their new understanding of physical computing and contribute to the discussions around hybrid craft within HCI and educational contexts.

In a process of Research-through-Design two art digital jewellery pieces were created on the same bespoke IoT device that connects a person with the sea: a hand-held piece (SeaVessel) and a necklace (Thalassa). Drawing on the notion of atmosphere, the design development (2020-21) and the first author's lived experience with the pieces (2021-2022) are illustrated and narrated. We share insights into how the pieces augmented intimacy with a significant place and offer a space for self-reflection for the first author to explore their connection with the sea and ultimately the self. We offer insights gained from working with IoT, live data and online servers in such a poetic context. We contribute to experiential approaches to designing reflective and curious ways of interacting with digital technology with the notion of atmosphere as a concept for aesthetics for interaction design and an understanding of data as poetic data.

A body of HCI work focuses on cultural heritage settings, such as museums, galleries, and historic sites – domains where established digital technologies such as interactive screens and mobile guid...

This special issue focuses on new perspectives of time within HCI research. We begin by explicating how HCI’s views of time have broadened over the years, going beyond the traditional subjective-objective dichotomy. We describe how the HCI community was originally anchored to clock time, but more recently the field has begun to incorporate the existential, social, and cultural dimensions of time. We introduce the papers in this special issue by contextualizing them according to different research areas. We conclude by identifying open issues and opportunities that should be explored in future HCI research and practice.

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.

This paper argues how a more reflective design practice that embraces critical discourses can transform interactive exhibition design and therefore the museum visiting experience. Four framing arguments underpin our exhibition design making: the value of materiality, visiting as an aesthetic experience, challenging the authorized voice, and heritage as a process. These arguments were embodied through design, art and craft practice into one interactive exhibition at a house museum. We draw from our design process discussing the implications that adopting an approach informed by critical heritage debates has on exhibition design and suggest three sensitizing concepts (polyvocal narratives, dialogical interaction, interweaving time and space) bridging the practice of interactive exhibition design and critical heritage theory.

Motivation : The past 25 years have seen a constant increase in the use of information technology to deliver digital content in cultural heritage settings. Museums have experimented with multimedia PCs, PDAs and phones, table-tops, Google Glass and now VR. The aim has always been to provide more information despite the fact that only a minority of visitors consumes the information on offer. Failing to engage visitors should direct our concerns on the 'receiving' side rather than on the 'delivering' side, that is to say to look at the visitors' experience rather than the technology [1].

This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a co-design process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation.

Despite years of HCI research on digital technology in museums, it is still unclear how different interactions impact on visitors'. A comparative evaluation of smart replicas, phone app and smart cards looked at the personal preferences, behavioural change, and the appeal of mobiles in museums. 76 participants used all three interaction modes and gave their opinions in a questionnaire; participants interaction was also observed. The results show the phone is the most disliked interaction mode while tangible interaction (smart card and replica combined) is the most liked. Preference for the phone favour mobility to the detriment of engagement with the exhibition. Different behaviours when interacting with the phone or the tangibles where observed. The personal visiting style appeared to be only marginally affected by the device. Visitors also expect museums to provide the phones against the current trend of developing apps in a "bring your own device" approach.

Shaping personalisation in a scenario of tangible, embedded and embodied interaction for cultural heritage involves challenges that go well beyond the requirements of implementing content personalisation for portable mobile guides. Content is coupled with the physical experience of the objects, the space, and the facets of the context—being those personal or social—acquire a more prominent role. This paper presents a personalisation framework to support complex scenarios that combine the physical, the digital, and the social dimensions of a visit. It is based on our experience of collaborating with curators and museum experts to understand and shape personalisation in a way that is meaningful to them and to visitors alike, that is sustainable to implement, and effective in managing the complexity of context-awareness. The proposed approach features a decomposition of personalisation into multiple layers of complexity that involve a blend of customisation on the visitor's initiative or according to the visitor's profile, system context-awareness, and automatic adaptivity computed by the system based on the visitor's behaviour model. We use a number of case studies of implemented exhibitions where this approach was used to illustrate its many facets and how adaptive techniques can be effectively complemented with interaction design, rich narratives and visitors’ choice to create deeply personal experiences. Overarching reflections spanning case studies and prototypes provide evidence of the viability of the proposed framework, and illustrate the final effect of the user experience.

This paper presents the design, implementation, use and evaluation of a tangible data souvenir for an interactive museum exhibition. We define a data souvenir as the materialisation of the personal visiting experience: a data souvenir is dynamically created on the basis of data recorded throughout the visit and therefore captures and represents the experience as lived. The souvenir provides visitors with a memento of their visit and acts as a gateway to further online content. A step further is to enable visitors to contribute, in other words the data souvenir can become a means to collect visitor-generated content. We discuss the rationale behind the use of a data souvenir, the design process and resulting artefacts, and the implementation of both the data souvenir and online content system. Finally, we examine the installation of the data souvenirs as part of a long-lasting exhibition: the use of this souvenir by visitors has been logged over 7 months and issues around the gathering of user-generated content in such a way are discussed.

It is of paramount importance that cultural heritage professionals are directly involved in the design of digitally augmented experiences in their museum spaces. We propose an approach based on a catalogue of reusable narrative and interaction strategies with step-by-step instructions on how to adapt and instantiate them for a specific museum and type of visitors. This work is conducted in the context of the European-funded project meSch.

We use design research to explore ways in which tangible and embodied interaction can be used to create novel experiences of heritage. We identified five design principles and used them to frame the challenge. In collaboration with curators, we co-created an interactive multi-narrative soundscape for the remains of trenches and a fortified camp from World War I. The soundscape is activated by presence and the use of a bespoke device. The design intertwines technology and historical content in context to augment the visitors' experience of the place in an evocative, personal way. The field trial showed that experimenting with different forms is key, as they have an impact on visitors' expectations beyond what they experience directly. It also showed the value in simultaneously designing interaction and content to achieve an effect that goes beyond the contribution of the single components.

This paper presents the design, creation and use of tangible smart replicas in a large-scale museum exhibition. We describe the design rationale for the replicas, the process used in their creation, as well as the implementation and deployment of these replicas in a live museum exhibition. Deployment of the exhibition resulted in over 14000 visitors interacting with the system during the 6 months that the exhibition was open. Based on log data, interviews and observations, we examine the reaction to these smart replicas from the point of view of the museum curators and also of the museum's visitors and reflect on the fulfillment of our expectations.

We report the results of an extended empirical two-stage study on the aesthetics of hybrid objects that combine form and behaviour. By combining two shapes (spheres and cubes); two sizes (7.5cm and 15cm); two materials (fabric and plastic); and four behaviours (emitting light, emitting sound, vibrating or displaying no behaviour) we created 32 objects that differ for a single feature. In a between-participants study, 175 participants assessed and described the 32 objects. From this, seven dimensions were identified: pleasant; interesting; comfortable; playful; relaxing; special and surprising. In a second between-participants experiment 486 participants rated each object on the seven dimensions from the first study. Overall Spheres, Fabric, and Vibration were the preferred features, but for some of the dimensions specific combinations of features were rated more positively. This paper contribution is twofold: it provides a first study on the aesthetic of tangible interaction as a combination of form and behaviour outlining a potential instrument to measure it; and it provides empirical evidence of the value of experimenting with different forms (spheres) and material (fabric) even if they are difficult to create as they generate the strongest aesthetic effects.

Many embedded platforms that support the creation of interactive smart objects have become available over the last years. Arduino, Raspberry Pi, electric imp, mbed, MSP430, and .NET Gadgeteer are examples of hardware platforms with very different properties and capabilities. In order to make interactive artifacts additional sensors, actuators, and networking elements are available for the different platforms. Additionally there are different software environments and development tools that support developers in creating custom applications for embedded systems. It is apparent that one size doesn't fit all and that choosing the right platform and tools is an important step towards an effective solution. In this TEI2014 studio we first provide an overview of available platforms and tools that allow developers to create novel and tangible interactive systems. We will present and discuss developing environments, with a specific focus on browser based programming tools and social coding. In a second step we will have 2 hands-on sessions, where in each we use a different platform and create an initial functional prototype. The aim is to provide the participants with an overview of existing embedded development tools suitable for creating interactive artifacts and to provide some hands on-experience with different new platforms.

In order to better explore the opportunities for tangible interaction in new areas such as the home or cultural heritage sites, we used multiple rapidly-developed prototypes that take advantage of existing technology. Physical prototypes allow us to give form to ideas and to evaluate the integration of form and function, two core components of tangible interaction. We discuss potentials and pitfalls when using off-the-shelf digital devices (by embedding a device, cracking it open and building on it, or collating board and parts) through six prototypes developed in two studies. Hacking devices to materialize our ideas proved excellent for fast prototyping. Technology imposed constraints and prompted different design solutions than initially intended offering unexpected ways to engage. On the basis of this experience we outline a process and offer guidelines for the fast prototyping of tangible interactions.

Drawing on a field study with eight families in northern England, we explore the traditions and rituals carried out at Christmas, looking at the artifacts and processes that constitute family life at this time of year. In addition to individual differences, a common pattern emerges: an extended preparation is carried out by the hosting household over a few weeks to set up the celebration and build expectations; preparation gives way to a short but intense celebration shared with the family or intimate friends; then decorations are stored and there is a return to normal life. The celebration is across generations, and everyone takes part. We note examples of new and evolving rituals. Starting from the three identified phases, we discuss the theoretical and technical implications of our findings for the design of more sympathetic technology that holds potential for augmenting family rituals sensitively and possibly creating new ones.

Elaborating on the result of a field study of Christmas traditions in eight British households, we explore the design of technology specifically aimed at augmenting existing practices. Four concepts that favoured playfulness and engagement across generations were discussed in a workshop with eight people who took part in the initial field study. The importance of being connected and spending time together in a way that reinforces the family bonding was evident. The enthusiasm demonstrated during the workshop for some proposals and participants' engagement in revisiting those that did not feel right to produce better concepts seems to demonstrate there is space for interaction design that is ethnographically motivated and aesthetically harmonious with the meaning of home.

Lifelogging is a technically inspired approach that attempts to address the problem of human forgetting by developing systems that ‘record everything’. Uptake of lifelogging systems has generally been disappointing, however. One reason for this lack of uptake is the absence of design principles for developing digital systems to support memory. Synthesising multiple studies, we identify and evaluate 4 new empirically motivated design principles for lifelogging: Selectivity, Embodiment, Synergy and Reminiscence. We first summarise 4 empirical studies that motivate the principles, then describe the evaluation of 4 novel systems built to embody these principles. The design principles were generative, leading to the development of new classes of lifelogging system, as well as providing strategic guidance about how those systems should be built. Evaluations suggest support for Selection and Embodiment principles, but more conceptual and technical work is needed to refine the Synergy and Reminiscence principles.

Digital mementos are increasingly problematic, as people acquire large amounts of digital belongings that are hard to access and often forgotten. Based on fieldwork with 10 families, we designed a new type of embodied digital memento, the FM Radio. It allows families to access and play sonic mementos of their previous holidays. We describe our underlying design motivation where recordings are presented as a series of channels on an old fashioned radio. User feedback suggests that the device met our design goals: being playful and intriguing, easy to use and social. It facilitated family interaction, and allowed ready access to mementos, thus sharing many of the properties of physical mementos that we intended to trigger.

Many studies have explored social processes and technologies associated with sharing photos. In contrast, we explore the role of sound as a medium for social reminiscing. We involved 10 families in recording 'sonic souvenirs' of their holidays. They shared and discussed their collections on their return. We compared these sounds with their photo taking activities and reminiscences. Both sounds and pictures triggered active collaborative reminiscing, and attempts to capture iconic representations of events. However sounds differed from photos in that they were more varied, familial and creative. Further, they often expressed the negative or mundane in order to be 'true to life', and were harder to interpret than photos. Finally we saw little use of pure explanatory narrative. We reflect on the relations between sound and family memory and propose new designs on the basis of our findings, to better support the sharing and manipulation of social sounds.

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past.

Current technology makes it possible to capture huge amounts of information related to everyday experiences. Despite this, we know little about the processes by which people identify and manage mementos - objects which are directly meaningful to their memories. Among the millions of objects people encounter in a lifetime, few become such reminders of people, places or events. We report fieldwork where participants gave us a tour of their homes describing how and why particular objects become mementos. Our findings extend the existing digital memory literature; first our participants didn't view their activities as experiential 'capture', nor were mementos limited to pictorial representations of people and events; instead they included everyday objects. Furthermore, mementos were not only displayed and shared, but also integrated into everyday activities. Finally there were complex relations between house location and memento type. We discuss the theoretical and technical implications of our work.

Abstract A novel and complex form of information access is cross‐language information retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. The authors present three user evaluations undertaken during the iterative design of Clarity, a cross‐language retrieval system for low‐density languages, and shows how the user‐interaction design evolved depending on the results of usability tests. The first test was instrumental to identify weaknesses in both functionalities and interface; the second was run to determine if query translation should be shown or not; the final was a global assessment and focused on user satisfaction criteria. Lessons were learned at every stage of the process leading to a much more informed view of what a cross‐language retrieval system should offer to users.

In this demo paper, we present AKTiveDoc, a tool for supporting sharing and reuse of knowledge in document production (e.g. writing) and use (e.g. reading).

Abstract This report presents a case study of the development of an interface for a novel and complex form of document retrieval: searching for texts written in foreign languages based on native language queries. Although the underlying technology for achieving such a search is relatively well understood, the appropriate interface design is not. A study involving users from the beginning of the design process is described, and it covers initial examination of user needs and tasks, preliminary design and testing of interface components, building, testing, and refining the interface, and, finally, conducting usability tests of the system. Lessons are learned at every stage of the process, leading to a much more informed view of how such an interface should be built.

No abstract available.

Amilcare is a tool for Adaptive Information Extraction (IE) designed for supporting active annotation of documents for the Semantic Web (SW). It can be used either for unsupervised document annotation or as a support for human annotation. Amilcare is portable to new applications/domains without any knowledge of IE, as it just requires users to annotate a small training corpus with the information to be extracted. It is based on (LP)2, a supervised learning strategy for IE able to cope with different texts types, from newspaper-like texts, to rigidly formatted Web pages and even a mixture of them[1][5].Adaptation starts with the definition of a tag set for annotation, possibly organized as an ontology. Then users have to manually annotate a small training corpus. Amilcare provides a default mouse-based interface called Melita, where annotations are inserted by first selecting a tag from the ontology and then identifying the text area to annotate with the mouse. Differently from similar annotation tools [4, 5], Melita actively supports training corpus annotation. While users annotate texts, Amilcare runs in the background learning how to reproduce the inserted annotation. Induced rules are silently applied to new texts and their results are compared with the user annotation. When its rules reach a (user-defined) level of accuracy, Melita presents new texts with a preliminary annotation derived by the rule application. In this case users have just to correct mistakes and add missing annotations. User corrections are inputted back to the learner for retraining. This technique focuses the slow and expensive user activity on uncovered cases, avoiding requiring annotating cases where a satisfying effectiveness is already reached. Moreover validating extracted information is a much simpler task than tagging bare texts (and also less error prone), speeding up the process considerably. At the end of the corpus annotation process, the system is trained and the application can be delivered. MnM [6] and Ontomat annotizer [7] are two annotation tools adopting Amilcare's learner.In this demo we simulate the annotation of a small corpus and we show how and when Amilcare is able to support users in the annotation process, focusing on the way the user can control the tool's proactivity and intrusivity. We will also quantify such support with data derived from a number of experiments on corpora. We will focus on training corpus size and correctness of suggestions when the corpus is increased.

This paper reports on the user-centered design methodology and techniques used for the elicitation of user requirements and how these requirements informed the first phase of the user interface design for a Cross-Language Information Retrieval System. We describe a set of factors involved in analysis of the data collected and, finally discuss the implications for user interface design based on the findings.

This paper examines user behavior during multimodal human-computer interaction (HCI). It discusses how pointing, natural language, and graphical layout should be integrated to enhance the usability of multimodal systems. Two experiments were run to study simulated systems capable of understanding written natural language and mouse-supported pointing gestures. Results allowed to: (a) develop a taxonomy of communication acts aimed at identifying targets; (b) determine the conditions under which specific referent identification strategies are likely to be produced; (c) suggest guidelines for designing effective multimodal interfaces; (d) show that performance is strongly influenced by interface graphical layout and by user expertise. Our study confirms the value of simulation as a tool for building HCI models and supports the basic idea that linguistic, visual, and motor cues can be integrated to favor effective multimodal communication.