In sustainable HCI, the ‘Cornucopian Paradigm’ describes how the expansion of digital services goes hand in hand with the growth of digital infrastructure and its environmental footprint. Yet, the mechanisms driving this paradigm are not well understood at the design level. As a case study, we investigate how messaging apps factor in the cornucopian paradigm by conducting a feature analysis of 17 apps complemented with 12 user interviews. We identify four scale-up mechanisms that explain how design contributes to the cornucopian paradigm. These mechanisms all contribute to use intensification, i.e., digital practices becoming more intensive and leading to more data intensity, to infrastructure expansion, and indirectly to device obsolescence and replacement. Our analysis of use intensification builds upon a set of recurring cornucopian design patterns we identified in messaging apps. To mitigate the cornucopian paradigm, we propose a set of moderation heuristics to guide design decisions.

How to handle gender with machine learning is a controversial topic. A growing critical body of research brought attention to the numerous issues transgender communities face with the adoption of current automatic gender recognition (AGR) systems. In contrast, we explore how such technologies could potentially be appropriated to support transgender practices and needs, especially in non-Western contexts like Japan. We designed a virtual makeup probe to assist transgender individuals with passing, that is to be perceived as the gender they identify as. To understand how such an application might support expressing transgender individuals gender identity or not, we interviewed 15 individuals in Tokyo and found that in the right context and under strict conditions, AGR based systems could assist transgender passing.

Programming-by-example (PBE), can be a powerful tool to reduce manual work in repetitive data transformation tasks. However, few examples often leave ambiguity and may cause undesirable data transformation by the system. This ambiguity can be resolved by allowing the user to directly edit the synthesized programs; however, this is difficult for non-programmers. Here, we present a novel approach: data-centric disambiguation for data transformation, where users resolve the ambiguity in data transformation by examining and modifying the output rather than the program. The key idea is to focus on the given set of data the user wants to transform instead of pursuing the synthesized program’s generality or completeness. Our system provides visualization and interaction methods that allow users to efficiently examine and fix the transformed outputs, which is much simpler than understanding and modifying the program itself. The user study suggests that our system can successfully help non-programmers to more easily and efficiently process data.

The amount of information available on the web is too vast for individuals to be able to process it all. To cope with this issue, digital platforms started relying on algorithms to curate, filter and recommend content to their users. This problem has generally been envisioned from a technical perspective, as an optimization issue and has been mostly untouched by design considerations. Through 16 interviews with daily users of platforms, we analyze how curation algorithms influence their daily experience and the strategies they use to try to adapt them to their own needs. Based on these empirical findings, we propose a set of four speculative design alternatives to explore how we can integrate curation algorithms as part of the larger fabric of design on the web. By exploring interactions to counter the binary nature of curation algorithms, their uniqueness, their anti-historicity and their implicit data collection, we provide tools to bridge the current divide between curation algorithms and people.

Professional designers and developers often struggle when transitioning between the design and implementation of an interactive system. We conducted three studies that focused on the design of custom interactions to understand the mismatches between their processes, tools, and representations. We found that current practices induce unnecessary rework and cause discrepancies between design and implementation. We identified three recurring types of breakdowns: omitting critical details, ignoring edge cases, and disregarding technical limitations. We propose four design principles to create tools that mitigate these problems: Provide multiple viewpoints , maintain a single source of truth , reveal the invisible, and support design by enaction . We applied these principles to create E NACT , a live environment for prototyping touch-based interactions. We conducted two studies to assess E NACT and to compare designer–developer collaboration with E NACT versus current tools. Results suggest that E NACT helps participants detect more edge cases, increases designers’ participation and provides new opportunities for co-creation.

Traditional graphic design tools emphasize the grid for structuring layout. Interviews with professional graphic designers revealed that they use surprisingly sophisticated structures that go beyond the grid, which we call graphical substrates. We present a framework to describe how designers establish graphical substrates based on properties extracted from concepts, content and context, and use them to compose layouts in both space and time. We developed two technology probes to explore how to embed graphical substrates into tools. Contextify lets designers tailor layouts according to each reader's intention and context; while Linkify lets designers create dynamic layouts based on relationships among content properties. We tested the probes with professional graphic designers, who all identified novel uses in their current projects. We incorporated their suggestions into StyleBlocks, a prototype that reifies CSS declarations into interactive graphical substrates. Graphical substrates offer an untapped design space for tools that can help graphic designers generate personal layout structures.

Professional interaction designers and software developers have different trainings and skills, yet they need to closely collaborate to create interactive systems. We conducted three studies to understand the mismatches between their processes, tools and representations. Based on 16 interviews, we found that current practices induce unnecessary rework and cause discrepancies between the original design and the implementation. We identified three key design breakdowns where designers omitted critical details, ignored the presence of edge cases or disregarded technical limitations. We next observed two face-to-face meetings between designers and developers. We found that early involvement of the developer helped to mitigate potential design breakdowns but new ones emerged as the project unfolded. Finally, we ran a participatory design session with two designer/developer pairs. Both pairs had difficulty representing and communicating pre-existing interactions. Creating complete interaction descriptions required iterating from individual examples to rule-based representations. We conclude with implications for designing collaborative tools that facilitate the designer's ability to express and the developer's ability to implement complex interactive systems.

Aligning and distributing graphical objects is a common, but cumbersome task. In a preliminary study (six graphic designers, six non-designers), we identified three key problems with current tools: lack of persistence, unpredictability of results, and inability to 'tweak' the layout. We created StickyLines, a tool that treats guidelines as first-class objects: Users can create precise, predictable and persistent interactive alignment and distribution relationships, and 'tweaked' positions can be maintained for subsequent interactions. We ran a [2x2] within-participant experiment to compare StickyLines with standard commands, with two levels of layout difficulty. StickyLines performed 40% faster and required 49% fewer actions than traditional alignment and distribution commands for complex layouts. In study three, six professional designers quickly adopted StickyLines and identified novel uses, including creating complex compound guidelines and using them for both spatial and semantic grouping.

Although ubiquitous, color pickers have remained largely unchanged for 25 years. Based on contextual interviews with artists and designers, we created the Color Portraits design space to characterize five key color manipulation activities: sampling and tweaking individual colors, manipulating color relationships, combining colors with other elements, revisiting previous color choices, and revealing a design process through color. We found similar color manipulation requirements with scientists and engineers. We designed novel color interaction tools inspired by the design space, and used them as probes to identify specific design requirements, including: interactive palettes for sampling colors and exploring relationships; color composites for blending and decomposing colors with other elements; interactive histories to enable reuse of previous color choices; and providing color as a way to reveal underlying processes. We argue that color tools should allow users to interact with colors, not just pick or sample them.