People’s interaction with computers has been explained through several theories and methods throughout the history of computers and their uses; more complex scenarios of ubiquitous and pervasive computing experimented nowadays invite other ways of considering human-technology interaction. The enactive approach to cognition, centered in human experience in the environment, has shown itself as a possibility to understand interaction in these new scenarios. In this paper we present a view of interaction, named socioenactive, to explain our relation with contemporary computational technologies in scenarios of ubiquitous and pervasive systems, understood from the enactivist perspective. After presenting core concepts related to intersubjectivity that helped to build up what we mean by socioenactive interaction, we illustrate it with some scenarios of ubiquitous and pervasive technology (situated in a school, a museum and a hospital), designed for the study of the phenomena of interaction. Graspable aspects of intersubjectivity are raised in the considered scenarios and affordances for the socioenactive interaction are illustrated. Implications of the study are discussed leading to aspects to consider in a research agenda in the field.

As new technologies constantly change what we understand as a computer, Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) educators need to stay updated and prepare their students to work with an ever-growing number of socio-technical situations. This phenomenon constitutes a challenge for HCI syllabuses and practices, demanding diversified approaches to HCI education. In this article, we articulate Papert’s constructionism with Dewey’s theory of experience to propose an experience-based constructionism approach to practices in HCI education. We illustrate our approach in a case study with 55 computing undergraduate students engaged in the design and construction of open-ended, physical interactive artworks. Nine interactive artifacts were created. The students have shown an effective experience with our approach, reporting an expanded view of HCI, and demonstrating competence in appropriating new methods and instruments, suggesting the effectiveness of our approach to HCI education. Results of this work may encourage other HCI educators and practitioners to experience the proposed approach in their specific contexts.

Abstract Ubiquitous computing has brought new challenges for the design of scenarios for people–technology interactions. Despite considerable research on formal accessibility standards, related work has hardly investigated them in ubiquitous computing contexts. In this work, we investigate means of analyzing accessibility aspects in ubiquitous environments based on two standard instruments: the Universal Design (UD) Principles and Guidelines and the W3C-WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines of the World Wide Web Consortium). Both instruments were applied to the context of socioenactive ubiquitous environments, providing insights into their applicability and shortcomings. As a result of this analysis we constructed UbiAccess, an instrument to evaluate access in ubiquitous scenarios, which combines and extends characteristics of both UD and W3C-WCAG, filling in some of the gaps we identified. The application of UbiAccess to a case study shows the advantages of its use in informing the evaluation of access in ubiquitous scenarios.

New technologies and practices are constantly transforming our interaction with computational systems. These transformations bring challenges to the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field, along with a constant need to better understand and describe how the design of interactive systems is changing. Currently, movements and theories such as speculative design and embodied cognition present unconventional perspectives and bring debate into the field. We investigate what kind of artifacts and attitude towards the design of interactive systems emerged in the InsTime project, in which 9 interactive installations were co-designed addressing the concept of deep time. Our discussion draws on a juxtaposition of backgrounds in philosophy of science, speculative design, and embodied cognition to analyze and characterize the empirical data from the InsTime project. As contributions, besides presenting the 9 interactive installations from InsTime and their co-design process, our discussion leads to a characterization of an attitude towards design that we named socioenactive design.