Short-Form Video Content (SFVC) platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube Shorts have become important spaces for ADHD adults to share experiences. However, much existing research focuses on the challenges these platforms pose for ADHDers, including accentuating sleep problems and attention difficulties. This article presents an interview study with 32 ADHDers who articulated a more nuanced relationship with SFVC. It explores how engaging with ADHD communities on these platforms impacted ADHDers’ self-understanding, emotional well-being, and both online and offline relationships. ADHDers worked to maintain their agency in this attention economy, managing their experiences and intent through information seeking, self-regulation, handling misinformation, and curating algorithms. Findings are described under three themes: (1) Cultural Stigma and ADHD Perceptions Contextualize Engagement; (2) How ADHD SFVC Affects ADHDers’ Emotions and Contextual Behaviors; and (3) Broader Impacts on ADHD Relationships, Stigma, and Self-Perception. Challenging existing narratives, this work highlights the value of these communities for ADHDers.

Customisation can make health tracking on smartwatches more meaningful and engaging, yet children are rarely given the opportunity to shape the design of these wearables. To address this, as part of a technology probe, we developed a low-burden online customisation process for children with ADHD and their parents. This enabled 10 children (aged 8-11) with ADHD and a parent to rapidly customise a smartwatch application and smartphone SMS system to track their personal health data. The process had three main benefits: 1) it enabled real-time customisation of self-tracking technology probes which could be deployed with minimal development time; 2) it deepened our understanding of participants' self-tracking needs and preferences, including the importance of accessibility for children with ADHD; and 3) it enhanced children's short- and long-term engagement with the technology probe. We discuss these benefits, alongside the challenges encountered, and discuss how this approach can be applied in future studies.

Drawing is a fundamental communication tool in research involving children, offering familiarity and ease compared to writing. However, despite its use in co-design to convey ideas, children’s drawings are rarely the central focus of analysis. We aimed to gain a deeper understanding of drawings created by 10 - 11 year olds in co-design workshops that focused on developing smartwatch health data visualisations. To achieve this, we developed an initial analysis framework by combining and refining three existing taxonomies to ensure that we categorise a wide range of meaningful features efficiently. We show that this framework can systematically identify common themes and previously unnoticed elements of designs while also supporting the comparison of children’s drawings in broader literature using validated tools. Although this framework is currently focused on analysing data visualisations, it could be extended and used to analyse other types of children’s drawings.

The rise of commercial wearables for children has sparked ethical concerns about surveillance and autonomy. At a UK science fair, we engaged children aged 7-14 in a public involvement activity. Using visual analogue scales, we assessed their comfort levels in sharing wearable health data with different recipients (parents, teachers, doctors, and neighbours). Primary school children (aged 7-11) exhibited greater comfort in data sharing than their older counterparts, but they were still influenced by trust in recipients and the justification for data sharing. Notably, location data was highly sensitive with most children reluctant to share it, while they considered it advantageous to share allergy information. Secondary school children (aged 12-14) favoured sharing with doctors over parents and highlighted concerns about stigmatisation regarding their step count data due to associations with fitness. This initial involvement activity develops research questions related to children’s wearables as well as introducing design considerations for future work.

Although e-mail interfaces have not changed much in the past decade, how we manage our inbox has changed a lot, as a result of the growing number of messages we receive (The Radicati Group, 2015) a...

Resulting from treatment advances, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is now a long-term condition, and digital solutions are being developed to support people living with HIV in self-management. Sharing their health data with their peers may support self-management, but the trust, identity, privacy and security (TIPS) considerations of people living with HIV remain underexplored. Working with a peer researcher who is expert in the lived experience of HIV, we interviewed 26 people living with HIV in the United Kingdom (UK) to investigate how to design a peer data sharing platform. We also conducted rating activities with participants to capture their attitudes towards sharing personal data. Our mixed methods study showed that participants were highly sophisticated in their understanding of trust and in their requirements for robust privacy and security. They indicated willingness to share digital identity attributes, including gender, age, medical history, health and well-being data, but not details that could reveal their personal identity. Participants called for TIPS measures to foster and to sustain responsible data sharing within their community. These findings can inform the development of trustworthy and secure digital platforms that enable people living with HIV to share data with their peers and provide insights for researchers who wish to facilitate data sharing in other communities with stigmatised health conditions.

Users have access to a growing ecosystem of devices (desktop, mobile and wearable) that can deliver notifications and help people to stay in contact. Smartwatches are gaining popularity, yet little is known about the user experience and their impact on our increasingly always online culture. We report on a qualitative study with existing users on their everyday use of smartwatches to understand both the added value and the challenges of being constantly connected at the wrist. Our findings show that users see a large benefit in receiving notifications on their wrist, especially in terms of helping manage expectations of availability. Moreover, we find that response rates after viewing a notification on a smartwatch change based on the other devices available: laptops prompt quicker replies than smartphones. Finally, there are still many costs associated with using smartwatches, thus we make a series of design recommendations to improve the user experience of smartwatches.

HCI is increasingly exploring how temperature can be used as an interaction modality. One challenge is that temperature changes are perceived over the course of seconds. This can be attributed to both the slow response time of skin thermoreceptors and the latency of the technology used to heat and cool the skin. For this reason, thermal cues are typically used to communicate single states, such as an emotion, and then there is a pause of tens of seconds to allow the skin to re-adapt to a neutral temperature before sending another signal. In contrast, this paper presents the first experimental demonstration that continuous temperature changes can guide behaviour: significantly improving performance in a 2D maze navigation task, without having to return to a neutral state before a new signal is sent. We discuss how continuous thermal feedback may be used for real world navigational tasks.

Previous research has investigated whether temperature can augment a range of media including music, images and video. We describe the first experiment to investigate whether temperature can augment emotion conveyed by text messages. A challenge in prior work has been ensuring users can discern different thermal signals. We present an improved technique for thermal feedback that uses an array of three thermal stimulators. We demonstrate that the Thermal Array Display (TAD) increases users' ability to identify temperatures within a narrower range, compared to using a single thermal stimulator. While text messages dominate valence in the absence of context for temperature, the TAD consistently conveys arousal, and can enhance arousal of text messages, especially those that are emotionally neutral. We discuss potential applications of augmenting text with temperature.

Considerable research has focused on the problems that end users face when programming software, in order to help them overcome their difficulties, but there is little research into the problems that arise in physical computing when end users construct circuits and program them. In an empirical study, we observed end-user developers as they connected a temperature sensor to an Arduino microcontroller and visualized its readings using LEDs. We investigated how many problems participants encountered, the problem locations, and whether they were overcome. We show that most fatal faults were due to incorrect circuit construction, and that often problems were wrongly diagnosed as program bugs. Whereas there are development environments that help end users create and debug software, there is currently little analogous support for physical computing tasks. Our work is a first step towards building appropriate tools that support end-user developers in overcoming obstacles when constructing physical computing artifacts.

Eye contact is crucial to shared encounters in public spaces. However, most urban technologies that aim to foster social interaction' attention towards the device rather than to those with whom the encounter is shared. We present the design and evaluation of the Jokebox, a lightweight technology that requires two passers-by to coordinate actions to hear a joke. In three in the wild studies at different locations we found that our design supported micro-level coordination in a consistent manner: by encouraging people to make eye contact and by using audible jokes, users engaged in interactions that often led to further conversation and laughter. We describe how opportunities for macro-level coordination were key to the success of the installation, but varied by context. Finally, we present design implications for considering both the micro and macro levels of social coordination.

Technology not only brings benefits such as flexible working practices but can also have negative stressful consequences such as increasing email overload and the blurring of work-home boundaries. We report on an exploratory study that extends the current understanding of email usage by investigating how different professions at a university manage work and personal emails using different devices and how this impacts their work-home boundary management. Our findings lead us to identify two user groups: those with permeable boundaries (primarily academics) and those who have more rigid ones (primarily professional services employees) and that there are differences in when, where and how they manage their work and personal emails. In particular we find that some participants use micro-boundary strategies to manage transitions between work and personal life. Based on these novel findings we propose improvements of email software design to facilitate effective email, work-home boundary management, and support micro-boundary practices.

Providing access to and training in ICTs is seen as key to bridging the digital divide between technology-rich communities and those with poor IT infrastructures. Several projects have focused on providing ICTs for education in developing countries, of which the best known is One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). Although, there has been significant criticism of some of these projects, in particular OLPC, due to its use of a top-down implementation strategy and the limited evidence for its educational benefits, there has been comparatively little analysis of what underlies successful approaches. We aimed to address this deficit by conducting an ethnographic study of community-based projects organised by Blue Sparrow, a small charity that donates refurbished desktop computers to schools in rural Peru, as this organisation has experienced both successes and failures when implementing its educational technology projects. The relative success of Blue Sparrow highlights the benefits of: understanding local contexts; using a bottom up approach; involving stakeholders in setting programme objectives; and empowering communities. We argue that the educational impact of such projects can be improved by: providing teacher training; integrating computers into the wider curriculum; and providing teaching materials and clear objectives for volunteers.

Many companies would like to redesign their workspaces to make them more pleasant and even fun places to work in. An assumption is it will result in social and economic benefits. However, it can be difficult to achieve because of cost, level of disruption and regulations. We present an alternative approach that provides an injection of playfulness into "drab" office buildings. A lightweight technology intervention was designed - Mood Squeezer - that asks people to reflect on their mood by squeezing a colored ball from a box set. The squeezes are mirrored back as an aggregate colorful visualization on a public floor display. An in-the-wild study showed how this intervention was successful at getting people to squeeze their mood, leading to a diversity of conversations throughout the building. We discuss how this lightweight approach to office augmentation can provide new opportunities for opening up a "closed" workplace.

Activity trackers are increasingly popular, but they have high levels of abandonment and little evidence exists to suggest why this is. This paper explores barriers to engagement with activity trackers. We extend previous research by not only characterising the barriers users experienced, such as tracking accuracy and device aesthetics, but also by reporting the workarounds they created. We discuss implications for the design of activity tracking systems by reflecting on these workarounds, the potential for activity tracker design to help overcome existing barriers, and how customisation could play a role.

HCI projects are increasingly evaluating technologies in the wild, which typically involves working with communities over extended periods, often with the goal of effecting sustainable change. However, there are few descriptions of projects that have been successful in the long-term. In this paper we investigate what factors are important for developing long lasting community ICT interventions. We do this by analysing a successful action research project and provide five recommendations for facilitating sustained community engagement. CrowdMemo aimed to preserve local heritage in a town in rural Argentina and the project was set up so that it could be continued by the community once researchers had left. Participants created videos about personal memories of the town and over 600 people attended the premiere where they were first screened. The impact has not just been short-term and there has been sustained engagement with the project by stakeholders in the town and wider region: the local school integrated digital storytelling into its curriculum; the approach has been adopted by two nearby towns; and the project has influenced regional government educational policy.

Recent advances in mobile technology have had many positive effects on the ways in which people can combine work and home life. For example, having remote access enables people to work from home, or work flexible hours that fit around caring responsibilities. They also support communication with colleagues and family members, and enable digital hobbies. However, the resulting 'always-online' culture can undermine work-home boundaries and cause stress to those who feel under pressure to respond immediately to digital notifications. This workshop will explore how a socio-technical perspective, which views boundaries as being constituted by everyday socio-technical practices, can inform the design of technologies that help maintain boundaries between work and home life.

Very little research has concurrently explored the influence of both physical space and social context (or place) on the way people engage with a public interactive display. We addressed this issue with a novel approach: studying how people engaged with the same interactive installation in ten situations with varying spatial and social properties. The main finding across these studies is that place trumps space: a conducive social context could overcome a poor physical space and encourage interaction; conversely, an inappropriate social context could inhibit interaction in spaces that might normally facilitate engagement. We discuss this finding in terms of the salience of the display within the space, the visibility of incidental interactions with the installation, the different understandings of place that people can have in the same location and the role of emergent champions and comperes in encouraging interaction.

Verbal autopsy (VA) involves interviewing relatives of the deceased to identify the probable cause of death and is typically used in settings where there is no official system for recording deaths or their causes. Following the interview, physician assessment to determine probable cause can take several years to complete. The World Health Organization (WHO) recognizes that there is a pressing need for a mobile device that combines direct data capture and analysis if this technique is to become part of routine health surveillance. We conducted a field test in rural South Africa to evaluate a mobile system that we designed to meet WHO requirements (namely, simplicity, feasibility, adaptability to local contexts, cost-effectiveness and program relevance). If desired, this system can provide immediate feedback to respondents about the probable cause of death at the end of a VA interview. We assessed the ethical implications of this technological development by interviewing all the stakeholders in the VA process (respondents, fieldworkers, physicians, population scientists, data managers and community engagement managers) and highlight the issues that this community needs to debate and resolve.

Vibrotactile feedback offers much potential for facilitating and accelerating how people learn sensory-motor skills that typically take hundreds of hours to learn, such as learning to play a musical instrument, skiing or swimming. However, there is little evidence of this benefit materializing outside of research lab settings. We describe the findings of an in-the-wild study that explored how to integrate vibrotactile feedback into a real-world teaching setting. The focus of the study was on exploring how children of different ages, learning to play the violin, can use real-time vibrotactile feedback. Many of the findings were unexpected, showing how students and their teachers appropriated the technology in creative ways. We present some 'lessons learned' that are also applicable to other training settings, emphasizing the need to understand how vibrotactile feedback can switch between being foregrounded and backgrounded depending on the demands of the task, the teacher's role in making it work and when feedback is most relevant and useful. Finally, we discuss how vibrotactile feedback can provide a new language for talking about the skill being learned that may also play an instrumental role in enhancing learning.

There are a number of mobile shopping aids and recommender systems available, but none can be easily used for a weekly shop at a local supermarket. We present a minimal, mobile and fully functional lambent display that clips onto any shopping trolley handle, intended to nudge people when choosing what to buy. It provides salient information about the food miles for various scanned food items represented by varying lengths of lit LEDs on the handle and a changing emoticon comparing the average miles of all the products in the trolley against a social norm. When evaluated in situ, the lambent handle display nudged people to choose products with fewer food miles than the items they selected using their ordinary shopping strategies. People also felt guilty when the average mileage of the contents of their entire shopping trolley was above the social norm. The findings are discussed in terms of how to provide different kinds of product information that people care about, using simple lambent displays.

Musical harmony is considered to be one of the most abstract and technically difficult parts of music. It is generally taught formally via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is represented using an existing interactive desktop tool, Harmony Space, a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges. This focuses not on abstract concepts, but on concrete locations, objects, areas and trajectories.

Visualization has an increasingly important role to play in scientific research. Moreover, visualization has a special role to play within artificial life as a result of the informal status of its key explananda: life and complexity. Both are poorly defined but apparently identifiable via raw inspection. Here we concentrate on how visualization techniques might allow us to move beyond this situation by facilitating increased understanding of the relationships between an ALife system's (low-level) composition and organization and its (high-level) behavior. We briefly review the use of visualization within artificial life, and point to some future developments represented by the articles collected within this special issue.

Sensor evolution research typically uses evolutionary algorithms (EAs) to generate sensors that near-optimally satisfy large numbers of constraints. This is qualitatively different from the phylogenetic process found in nature that has resulted, for example, in the mammalian auditory ossicles evolving from the jaw bones of amphibians and reptiles, that in turn had previously acted as gill arches in fish. This paper describes an evolvable hardware experiment that resulted in a network of transistors sensing and utilising the radio waves emanating from nearby PCs. We argue that this evolved 'radio' is only the second device ever whose sensors were constructed in a way that in key aspects is analogous to that found in nature. We highlight the advantages and disadvantages of this approach and show why it is practically impossible to implement a similar process in simulation.