The opaqueness of moderation systems can leave offenders of toxic behaviour disaffected and without recourse for change. We examined whether explainability, the means by which an automated system explains its decisions, can improve player responses to automated moderation decisions within the context of multiplayer games. Through a mixed methods experiment we evaluated players’ perceptions of six explanations of an automated temporary ban decision. Despite finding only minor benefits to explainable AI methods over the best current explanation used in practice, we found that justification, i.e. providing evidence within an explanation, is fundamental for improving players’ perceived fairness and emotional response to moderation. We contextualise these results through a reflexive thematic analysis in which we identify four themes that reflect players’ competing understandings of both explainability and moderation. We conclude by proposing four design implications for researchers and developers to consider when designing explainability for future community management systems.

Although people often visit places of nature to disconnect from technology, increasingly digital tools are shaping these experiences. To better understand how technologies might become obtrusive in nature settings, and how people manage such obtrusiveness, we conducted a field study of 30 adults visiting an urban nature park and using digital tools that ranged in interactive intensity from simple photography, through photo sharing and plant identification, to a more immersive site-specific augmented reality app. Distinctive facets of the way they experienced technology as obtrusive were observed: deprivation, prescriptiveness, engrossment, diminishment, neediness, unreliability, and awkwardness. We identify six tactics used to manage these experiences: abstaining, limiting, minimising, deferring, delegating, and conforming. Our findings indicate that technological obtrusiveness is a complex experience affected not only by the intensity of interactive demands, but also incongruities between the way people desire to experience nature and technology-prescribed activities, and people’s agency to deploy mitigating tactics.

People often spend time in nature to escape an over-technologised life, yet they increasingly rely on technology to do so. Understanding how technology use shapes nature experiences is crucial, given their implications for wellbeing and environmental concern. Through in-depth interviews with 30 people, we examine this technology–nature paradox, focusing on commonplace digital tools used around visits to nature. Our findings chart how people assemble and manage a carefully chosen array of tools for each outing. We show how these technology choices depend on people’s adopted mode(s) of nature engagement, identifying six modes and their associated technologies: adventure, aesthetic, ambient, enquiry, escape, and novelty. We further demonstrate how these modes shape the temporal deployment of tools across phases of a visit: before, during, and after. We offer an interpretation of how people seek to manage the technology–nature paradox and consider broader implications for designing technologies for beneficial nature experiences.

Amidst escalating global concern about the intensification of bushfire (wildfire), we investigate how interactive, data-driven articles shape people’s engagement with this expanding environmental crisis. We build on critical discourse that positions climate informatics products as sociopolitical actors, as well as research on polarisation in environmental communication, through an empirical study of bushfire news coverage and its reception by urban Australians. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 7 fire science experts and 12 city-dwellers, who engaged with three interactive news articles. Our analysis highlights the challenges of navigating uncertainty, polarised and shifting discourse, and the emotional burden of bushfire communication. We show that engagement is shaped by a dynamic interplay between affective and cognitive sense-making, which can both motivate and inhibit attention. Participants expressed a desire for actionable, place-relevant information, yet often encountered barriers in interpreting complex or ambiguous visualisations. Based on these findings, we identify design opportunities for interactive articles that (1) respond to audiences’ existing exposure to environmental discourse, (2) scaffold engagement with uncertainty, (3) connect audiences with distant people and places, and (4) support pathways to collective action.

Despite the importance of the Information Technology (IT) sector for sustainability, there is a lack of guidance for including Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) in IT degree programs. This research investigates perspectives of staff, students and industry, and contextual factors, to develop strategies for embedding sustainability in IT curricula. We conducted a case study at an IT department in a major Australian university, through semi-structured interviews and workshops with academic staff (n=10), students (n=28), and industry professionals (n=5), and by analysing documentation such as university plans, handbooks and company reports. A thematic analysis was used to synthesise perspectives, and sustainability topics were mapped to IT knowledge areas. While IT professionals have increasingly important roles in addressing sustainability challenges, many IT staff and students are unaware of, or uncertain about, sustainability’s relevance to their field. Additional barriers to integrating sustainability into IT programs include lack of educator expertise, overcrowded curricula, and the lack of tailored resources and support. We provide an empirical account of stakeholder perspectives on integrating sustainability into IT curricula in Australia. We offer a framework and recommendations to address these issues through loose, program-level coordination, training and resources to empower educators, paving the way for more profound change. This case study offers valuable insights for integrating sustainability into IT curricula, along with a framework and strategies that can serve as useful starting points for universities to take practical, educator-led steps towards ESD.

Augmented Reality (AR) offers unique opportunities for contributing to zoos’ objectives of public engagement and education about animal and conservation issues. However, the diversity of animal exhibits pose challenges in designing AR applications that are not encountered in more controlled environments, such as museums. To support the design of AR applications that meaningfully engage the public with zoo objectives, we first conducted two scoping reviews to interrogate previous work on AR and broader technology use at zoos. We then conducted a workshop with zoo representatives to understand the challenges and opportunities in using AR to achieve zoo objectives. Additionally, we conducted a field trip to a public zoo to identify exhibit characteristics that impacts AR application design. We synthesise the findings from these studies into a framework that enables the design of diverse AR experiences. We illustrate the utility of the framework by presenting two concepts for feasible AR applications.

Technological progress has often been measured by the extent to which it shields and protects us from the harshness of nature. At the same time, it has long been recognised that our resulting disengagement from nature negatively affects our wellbeing and impedes awareness of our vital dependence on natural environments. To understand how HCI has considered the possibilities that digital technology offers for engaging with nature, we conducted a scoping review encompassing more than 20 years of HCI research on nature engagement. We compare the orientations, motivations, and methodologies of different threads within this growing body of work. We show how HCI research has enabled varied forms of direct and indirect engagement with nature, and we develop a typology of the roles proposed for technology in this work. We highlight promising and under-utilised approaches to designing for nature engagement and discuss directions for future research.

Two decades of focus on User Experience has yielded an array of digital technologies that help people experience, understand and share emotions. Although the effects of specific technologies upon emotion have been well studied, less is known about how people actively appropriate and combine the full range of devices, apps and services at their disposal to deliberately manage emotions in everyday life. We conducted a one-week diary study in which 23 adults recorded interactions between their emotions and technology use. They reported using a diverse range of emotion-shaping tools and strategies as part of coping with daily challenges, managing routines, and pursuing work and social goals. We analyse these data in the light of psychological theories of emotion. Our findings point to the significance of digital emotion regulation as a powerful perspective to inform wider debates about the impacts of technology on social and emotional well-being.

In creating digital technologies for animals, designers often seek to deploy and adapt human-centred techniques of interaction design. A significant challenge lies in enabling animals to play an active and generative role in the design process. This is of particular concern when the primary design objective is to address the behavioural and psychological needs of animal users. In collaboration with orangutans and human stakeholders at a zoo, we conducted co-design to create an interactive installation to enhance the orangutans' wellbeing. This paper presents the design journey undertaken and reflects on the challenges of designing with animals in a complex real-world setting. From this, we propose ways in which interaction design methods can be better adapted to working with animals by integrating qualitative and quantitative techniques drawn from the animal sciences. These reflections and proposals are relevant to researchers and practitioners investigating the design of animal-centred digital technologies.

Strong user engagement with digital technologies for behaviour change is often taken as a precursor to their longer-term efficacy. We critically examine this assumption through a qualitative study of a smoking cessation app, called NewLeaf, which allows quitters to swap personal stories. The study examined what influenced people to engage or disengage with NewLeaf, and how the app was deployed in quit attempts during a four week trial. Several properties of swapped stories were reported to promote engagement, including: authenticity, currency, contextualization of advice, and evoking a sense of community. But while the resulting engagement was sometimes productive in supporting quitting, other trajectories of use were observed involving counterproductive engagement, and a surprising pattern of productive disengagement especially among stronger quitters. We discuss how this analysis of different trajectories problematizes any simple interpretation of user engagement as an early indicator of success for behaviour change technologies.

Animal conservation organisations occasionally harness depictions of animals using digital technology to inspire interest in, and concern for animals. To better understand the forms of empathy experienced by people observing animal-computer interaction, we designed and studied an interactive installation for orangutans at a zoo. Through collaborative design we established an understanding of zoos' objectives and strategies related to empathy in the zoo context. We deployed a prototype installation, and observed and interviewed visitors who watched orangutans use the installation. Analysis of observations and interviews revealed that visitors responded with cognitive, affective and motor empathy for the animals. We propose that these empathetic responses are prompted by the visibility of orangutans' bodily movements, by the "anthropic frame" provided by digital technology, and by prompting reflection on animals' cognitive processes and affective states. This paper contributes new evidence and understanding of people's empathetic responses to observing animal-computer interaction and confirms the value of designing for empathy in its various forms

In HCI, the honeypot effect describes how people interacting with a system passively stimulate passers-by to observe, approach and engage in an interaction. Previous research has revealed the successive engagement phases and zones of the honeypot effect. However, there is little insight into: 1) how people are stimulated to transition between phases; 2) what aspects drive the honeypot effect apart from watching others; and 3) what constraints affect its self-reinforcing performance. In this paper, we discuss the honeypot effect as a spatiotemporal model of trajectories and influences. We introduce the Honeypot Model based on the analysis of observations and interaction logs from Encounters, a public installation that interactively translated bodily movements into a dynamic visual and sonic output. In providing a model that describes trajectories and influences of audience engagement in public interactive systems, our paper seeks to inform researchers and designers to consider contextual, spatial and social factors that influence audience engagement.

Zoos are increasingly introducing digital technologies to enhance visitors' experience of viewing animals, and promote the welfare and wellbeing of captive animals. Consequently, zoos are an immediate and important context for work in the discipline of animal-computer interaction (ACI). However, zoo enclosure design has a long history of transformation in line with existing theories, influenced by notions of naturalism and visitor immersion. In this paper, we discuss this literature in the context of the growing field of ACI, further drawing on interviews with zoo staff conducted as part of a larger project exploring digital enrichment to highlight the relevant implications for design.

An ongoing aim of human-computer interaction (HCI) is to understand what is meant by user experience, and how to measure it. This is more complex in the case of animal-computer interaction (ACI), in which the user is a non-human. In this paper we discuss the concepts and tools that animal welfare science offers ACI research for evaluating and assessing the effects of interactive devices on animals. We provide an overview of the current knowledge derived from animal welfare science, with a focus on the evaluation and assessment of technology on animal welfare. We also elaborate on perspectives for future collaboration between ACI and animal welfare science: social environment, human-animal interactions, and environmental enrichment. A greater understanding of the evolution of animal welfare science will inform the development of ACI as a fruitful, rigorous and sustainable scientific endeavour.

Zoos are making increasing use of digital technology for visitor interpretations and for animal enrichment and research. Modern zoos place considerable emphasis on animal welfare, on constructing positive human-animal interactions as a foundation for education, and shaping public attitudes towards wildlife and conservation. These objectives have much in common with the stated goals of ACI. To date, only limited ACI research has been conducted in the context of the zoo. Through my research, I aim to provide a foundation for ACI to contribute to the evolution of the zoo as a site of education, conservation and animal welfare best practice.