Our research, part of a larger study on exercise and well-being, focuses on the use of interactive artefacts in public spaces. Our findings suggest that many people have concerns about exercising in public due to inhibitions, insecurities, and social anxiety, which can affect behaviour in this context. Both well-being and physical mobility—the desired outcome—can be improved by new opportunities for activity, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of technological innovations, especially interactive ones, seems to be promising when it comes to encouraging active lifestyles and mobility in public places. Through its exploration of physical activity, this research unveils the social aspects inherent in the use of interactive projection in urban public spaces. We took an “in-the-wild” approach and conducted public studies using a research through design methodology. We found that while interactive projections can stimulate physical activity, effectiveness and acceptance are significantly influenced by interpersonal behaviours. Thus, changes in social interactions among different stakeholder groups could be observed both inside and outside the interaction space. This work highlights the need for future studies to consider visible and invisible social dynamics in the design and use of interactive public systems.

Abstract Students benefit from international study programmes in fields such as HCI. However, user-centred research in a foreign country has some challenges, especially language hurdles when going into the field and conducting ethnographic and participatory studies. A particular obstacle is added when targeting groups that do not speak English, such as in Germany, where English was not taught in schools until the 1970s. The task and challenge of the present project, ‘Research Buddy’, is to bring together young international students and older people as co-researchers in Germany. We describe the participatory development of the concept of a matching platform and its design. In focus groups with older people, university faculty and students, requirements for a collaborative research infrastructure were jointly identified and prototypically implemented. The empirical results focus on the possibilities the platform offers for qualitative citizen science in the field of age tech.

Abstract Robots used for care purposes have been the subject of considerable research effort, often interdisciplinary. However, our work has shown that there are frequently difficulties in working together to produce interdisciplinary knowledge on human–robot and human–computer interaction. We describe an initiative to enable participants within and across research projects to improve collaboration. Mandated by the funding body, we developed the Research Practice Workshop tool to bring together 10 projects and more than 100 people from science, technology and healthcare in a large-scale funding stream. Our tool creates space for interdisciplinary participation, despite its top-down project structure. We present data from seven Research Practice Workshops that illustrate how knowledge sharing worked and what challenges we faced in accordance with our iterative and participatory approach. The aim is to show how networks of practice transfer knowledge, facilitate interdisciplinary cooperation and create imaginaries of robotics for care. The Research Practice Workshops are a valuable tool for creating shared visions and practical implementations with all stakeholders in a democratic process. This demonstrates how design knowledge can become relevant in interdisciplinary collaboration and how Research Practice Workshops can support large scale research networks. Ultimately, our paper contributes both to best practices in heterodox scientific project management and to an understanding of how disciplinary perspectives mediate research.

Effective communication is vital in healthcare, especially in complex areas like prostate cancer diagnosis. Although there has been much research on communication among different stakeholders in healthcare, there is still a visible gap in addressing the different information exchange needs of doctors and patients, and how these can impact their communication during prostate cancer diagnosis. This paper explores these challenges from both patients' and doctors' - more specifically, radiologists' - perspectives. Through contextual inquiries and interviews with experienced radiologists, who play a key role in diagnosis, and patients with prostate cancer, we have gained valuable insights into current communication practices associated with the context and explored the potential of technology to support them. Our findings highlight the challenges faced by both stakeholders during diagnosis and their needs and preferences for improved communication. Based on those findings, we propose design implications for computer technologies to enhance communication among stakeholders, ultimately improving collaboration, efficiency, and patient outcomes in prostate cancer care.

Within practice-centred computing, working with people to understand and come up with solutions that can support them with their practices is core. This involves using a range of empirical and design methods for understanding the context, elaborating design implications, and devising and evaluating artefacts, both in terms of their usability and the appropriation opportunities that they can offer. When evaluating prototypes in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) we, as researchers, have more than once over a long period of time seen that participants have little time to engage in systematic approaches to co-design. Our experience shows that very often users cannot take part in activities that take longer than two hours, despite their willingness to do so. This suggests that we are in urgent need of more flexible approaches. In this paper we propose the concept of blended workshops as an approach to work with SME workers for the design of digital technologies to support their practices. This approach entails both synchronous and asynchronous activities, focusing on the elaboration of both physical and digital artefacts, which evolves over a longer period of time towards useful socio-technical solutions which can be easily appropriated at the workplace. The asynchronous elements are designed to allow participants to investigate and reflect in their own time and can can be key for stronger and flexible user participation in practice-centred design.

Using LLMs in healthcare, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and Social Computing requires the examination of ethical and social norms to ensure safe incorporation into human life. We conducted a mixed-method study, including an online survey with 111 participants and an interview study with 38 experts, to investigate the AI ethics and social norms in ChatGPT as an everyday life tool. This study aims to evaluate whether ChatGPT in an empirical context operates following ethics and social norms, which is critical for understanding actions in industrial and academic research and achieving machine ethics. The findings of this study provide initial insights into six important aspects of AI ethics, including bias, trustworthiness, security, toxicology, social norms, and ethical data. Significant obstacles related to transparency and bias in unsupervised data collection methods are identified as ChatGPT's ethical concerns.

An extensive literature on participatory design with older adults has, thus far, little to say about the support older adults need when involved in online activities. Our research suggests that to empower older adults in participatory design, scaffolding work has to be done. Scaffolding interactions - creating temporary instructional support to help the learning of participants - is a common approach in participatory design. Yet, when applied in online participatory design with older adults, the traditional understanding of the concept does not match the way older adults' learn. Hence, we argue for a new understanding of this term, which we call situated scaffolding. We illustrate our argument with a case where older adults collaborate online as part of a participatory design project. We unpack the different dimensions of situated scaffolding and discuss how this novel understanding can be used to further inform sustainable participatory design for and with older adults.

Robotic systems are increasingly seen as possible technical aids against the background of demographic change and the associated pressures on care systems, with increasing numbers of care recipients and a decreasing number of trained caregivers. In human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work, different design paradigms are currently being pursued to explore which features and appearances are favorable for meaningful interactions of humans with robotic systems. One such approach, labeled as "otherware", proposes to conceptualize robots beyond a naive anthropomorphism or zoomorphism, rather developing the idea of a figure that goes beyond the dichotomy between "being alive" and "being a technical artefact". We present an ethnographic study on the perceptions, attitudes, and practices of care attendants and nursing-home residents in their experimenting with off-the-shelf robotic cats and dogs. The three-week study shows specific appropriation practices of the robotic pets, and how the care attendants - partly together with the residents - define their experiences of the robotic pets, i.e., in which situations the robotic pets are considered either as living beings or as technology toys. The study provides practice-based insights into how possible uses of robotic pets could be meaningfully integrated into care practices, but also which ethical reflections were discussed during their use. Finally, this ethnographic study functioned as a collaborative learning process between researchers, care attendants, and residents, and thus also points out possible aspects that arose with regard to future learning spaces of professional and organizational development for dealing with innovative technologies in residential care contexts.

Despite a proliferation of research in the use of ICTs to support active and healthy ageing, few have considered the privacy and security concerns particular to the elderly. We investigated the appropriation of tablet devices and a neighborhood portal as well as emerging privacy and security issues through ethnographic and action research in a long-term participatory design (PD) project with elderly participants. We discuss two major themes: a) the tensions related to perceived digital threats and the social pressures of online disclosure to the social environment; and b) the relation of these issues to the ICT appropriation process and the referring challenges we encountered. We argue that there is a need to understand the interleaving of physical and virtual habitats, the various ways resulting in discomfort and the senior citizens' actions -- which at first glance appear contradictory. We consider the implications of the issues observed for examining privacy and security concerns more broadly as well as discussing implications for the design of the portal and the shaping of social measures for appropriation support.

HCI and CSCW researchers and practitioners are increasingly working in complex social and political contexts where their research activities involve emotional labor and where they have to confront moral and emotional dilemmas. Given the potential impact of these challenging situations on the wellbeing of researchers in the field, there is much need for a discourse on affective impact of research on the researcher. In this workshop, we invite discussion and reflection on the experiences of distress and the role of informal coping mechanisms (e.g., personal narratives) to address them. We will create a forum where researchers and practitioners can discuss and share experiences of projects in sensitive settings and work towards guidelines to inform future projects.

Research in the field of assistive technologies often claims to support their target group's autonomy. However, autonomy is mostly interpreted by the researchers and designers as independence or its meaning is not further specified. There are few studies where the users' perception and interpretation of autonomy is taken into account. Hence, technology for supporting autonomy is often rather intricate and based on a generalized notion of autonomy. We argue that autonomy contains more dimensions than just mere independence. Furthermore, we argue that the perception of autonomy is individually differing and focussing on small, individual solutions my help in shaping autonomy support on an individual level.

This paper contributes to the current discourse on practice-based research in HCI paying particular attention to the overall temporal and situational conditions which frame an R&D project. We present a Living Lab study situated in an arbitrary neighborhood of a German city which develops ICT support to foster informal help and social interaction with a special, but not exclusive, focus on elderly tenants. We demonstrate that practice-based, long-term research in a city quarter goes beyond those challenges already described in the current Living Lab and PD literature. The long-term study's positioning in a real-world context is contoured not only by a high diversity of stakeholders and their individual interests and motivation for participation but also by their individual skill sets and learning needs. These distinct and often contradictive perspectives have to be permanently counterbalanced. Thus attention has to be focused on how related strategies and decisions impact on the design of the project as well as on the final ICT product. To enable all tenants, irrespective of age and technical skill, to participate in a long-term ICT-based community development project, we applied the format of 'experience-based PD workshops' to foster confidence in ICT usage and encourage the competency of the elderly and non-tech-savvy tenants.

In this work we present a user-centered development process for a GPS-based monitoring system to be used in dementia care. Our research covers a full design process including a qualitative-empirical pre-study, the prototyping process and the investigation of long-term appropriation processes of the stable prototypes in three different practice environments. Specifically, we deal with the problem of 'wandering' by persons suffering from late-phase dementia. Although GPS tracking is not a novel technological objective, the usage of those systems in dementia care remains very low. The paper therefore takes a socio-technical stance on development and appropriation of GPS technology in dementia care and assesses the practical and ideological issues surrounding care to understand why. We additionally provide design research in two different settings, familial and institutional care, and report on the design of a GPS-based tracking system reflecting these considerations. What comes to the fore is the need for ICT to reflect complex organizational, ideological and practical issues that form part of a moral universe where sensitivity is crucial.

In this paper we wish to contribute to the recent ICT-design for and reflection of the application field of residential care homes. In doing so, the contribution of the paper is twofold: we wish to highlight some aspects of the every-day life of institutionalized elderly people - trust, sociality, and memory - which not only provoke reflection on design ideas but also on the socio-technical nexus in which design for the elderly has to take place. This domain, we suggest, is one where the 'parachuting in' of technology is unlikely to prove successful, for reasons we examine below. Further, we suggest that design for and with the elderly carries with it some specific problems. We illustrate our methodological reflections by means of an ongoing empirical research project which aims at the development of a large-screen display for a residential care home.

We present an empirical study that is being conducted in the context of developing a GPS locating system for individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) in Germany. A disposition of wandering is one of the most problematic symptoms as it fosters anxiety, disorientation and can even lead to life-threatening situations. Our qualitative empirical study contributes to the research on social phenomena which reveals some technical implications for the development of location-based services (LBS) in dementia care. We demonstrate that common concepts such as the dilemmas "awareness vs. privacy" in general and "safety vs. autonomy" in the context of monitoring systems for wandering patients need to be tackled from practice-based views. Our study attempts to understand caregivers' practices and attitudes towards these concepts.

The development of locative media applications is not simply about the physical location or social setting in which the interaction occurs, but rather about situating the media within a community of practice. This workshop will provide the environment for researchers to explore the potential for locative media applications to support community practices. The workshop will highlight the many open areas that require research attention, identify key problems that need to be addressed, and also discuss approaches for solving these issues. In particular the workshop will focus on appropriate methodologies for identifying requirements, evaluating behaviour and integrating locative media in specific real-world community structures.