New students face challenges when they make the transition from school to university. Existing digital technologies used during this transition can sometimes increase the stressors associated with change. In order to explore ways forward for technology design in this space, we developed a brochure of questionable concepts. The concepts were grounded in findings of our prior research, yet were also intended to act as provocations to promote discussion in workshops involving 32 first year university students. Our analysis of workshop discussions documents the diverse issues students face around social bonding, their home environment, and their academic performance. Our findings challenge assumptions made in prior work about the ease of transition to university. We demonstrate how questionable concepts can play an important role in prompting 'safe' conversations around stressful life events for adolescents.

A growing body of work explores the well-being of students. However, little work has addressed the experiences of student mothers, who must juggle the demands of study and childcare simultaneously. The rise of the student mother is taking place at a time when student learning and engagement as well as childcare has become highly digitised. Existing literature on work/life balance suggests a key issue for student mothers is management of the work-family border, such that they can choose to segregate or blend roles as appropriate. In this study, we used work-family border theory to examine the role that technology plays in supporting both the segregation and blending of student and parent roles, making recommendations for the ways that boundary maintenance might be more explicitly considered in digital systems design.

Increasingly our digital traces are providing new opportunities for self-reflection. In particular, social media (SM) data can be used to support self-reflection, but to what extent is this affected by the form in which SM data is presented? Here, we present three studies where we work with individuals to transform or remediate their SM data into a physical book, a photographic triptych and a film. We describe the editorial decisions that take place as part of the remediation process and show how the transformations allow users to reflect on their digital identity in new ways. We discuss our findings in terms of the application of Goffman's (1959) self-presentation theories to the SM context, showing that a fluid rather than bounded interpretation of our social media spaces may be appropriate. We argue that remediation can contribute to the understanding of digital self and consider the design implications for new SM systems designed to support self-reflection.

Many social media platforms support the curation of personal digital data, and, more recently, the use of that data for review and reflection. We explored the process of reflection by asking users to create a meaningful ‘triptych’ of photographs drawn from their Facebook accounts. In a first study, we asked participants to manually trawl their own accounts and select three relevant images, which we then framed and used as an interview probe. In a second study, we designed an automated triptych generation system and assessed participants’ experiences of using this system. We conducted qualitative analyses of participant interviews from both studies. Consistent with other ‘slow technology’ work, we found the act of creating a physical artefact from social media data gave that data new meaning, albeit with notable differences between manual versus automatically generated triptychs. We conclude by discussing possible improvements to the design of the automated triptych system.

New systems have been introduced that support the visualisation and sharing of personal digital data, but relatively little work has been done to establish how such systems support reminiscence and personal reflection. In this paper, we explore Intel’s Museum of Me , a tool that collates and presents Facebook data in the form of a virtual museum, by asking how such an automated biography might support personal reflection and a process of life review. We supported users in their creation of personal virtual museums and interviewed them about their experiences, using a theoretical framework that highlighted the importance of personal narratives and life review in identity formation and psychological well-being. Our participants enjoyed the experience and welcomed the opportunity for reminiscence, but considered their resulting videos to be rather shallow representations of self, reflective of some of the more trivial exchanges and relationships that can come to dominate social media. We argue that social media in its current form is not well suited to support a meaningful life-review process.

Social media is a common place for people to post and share digital reflections of their life events, including major events such as getting married, having children, graduating, etc. Although the creation of such posts is straightforward, the identification of events on online media remains a challenge. Much research in recent years focused on extracting major events from Twitter, such as earthquakes, storms, and floods. This paper however, targets the automatic detection of personal life events, focusing on five events that psychologists found to be the most prominent in people lives. We define a variety of features (user, content, semantic and interaction) to capture the characteristics of those life events and present the results of several classification methods to automatically identify these events in Twitter. Our proposed classification methods obtain results between 0.84 and 0.92 F1-measure for the different types of life events. A novel contribution of this work also lies in a new corpus of tweets, which has been annotated by using crowdsourcing and that constitutes, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available dataset for the automatic identification of personal life events from Twitter.

Identity technologies constitute one of the fastest growing areas for research and development, driven by both commercial and administrative imperatives. Crucially, they constitute the means by which we include or exclude individuals and groups in terms of access to goods, services or information -- yet few developments in this space embrace an inclusive or value sensitive design philosophy. We describe a rigorous exercise in which we source scenarios that capture new research in the identity space and use these as probes in an inclusive design process. Workshops were held with six marginalized community groups: young people, older adults, refugees, black minority ethnic (BME) women, people with disabilities, and mental health service users. Our findings echo Herzberg's two-factor theory in which we are able to identify a set of relatively common values around sources of potential dissatisfaction (hygiene factors) as well as a set of motivators that are differentially valued across communities.

This paper examines how an occupational group has adapted to the demands of working with a Location Based Service (LBS). Instead of following a rigid timetable, London's bus drivers are now required to maintain an equal distance between the bus in front and the one behind. Our qualitative study employs ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth semi-structured interviews to elicit drivers' perspectives of the new system and show how it has modified their driving and general work conditions. We explore how passengers influence the movement of the bus and how the technology frames bus drivers' relationships to their managers and commuters. This work contributes to our understanding of the impact of LBS in the workplace and shows how technological imperatives can be established that cause unanticipated consequences and gradually undermine human relationships.