Collective stress is the stress within a group or an organization. It affects individuals’ well-being and group productivity. HCI research has started exploring collective stress visualization to facilitate group awareness and collective coping via testing prototypes in controlled settings. However, an in-depth understanding of users’ needs and envisaged scenarios based on their authentic experiences are still lacking. In this study, we utilized a participatory approach called co-constructing stories to investigate how a collective stress visualization would be used in office workers’ authentic workday routines. We constructed use case stories with a group of office workers separately based on their personal lived experiences, using a design probe called AffectiveGarden. Our results categorized six clusters of benefits for collective coping through visualization and their implications for future design practice.

This research investigates the design space of combining touchscreens with passive rich-ID building block systems to support the physical construction of contexts in touchscreen interactions. With two proof-of-concept systems, RFIPillars and RFITiles, we explore various schemes for using tangible inputs for context enrichment in touchscreen interactions. Instead of incorporating an electronic touchscreen module that requires per-module maintenance, this work intentionally makes each tangible object passive. We explore rear-projection solutions to integrate touchscreen interactions into these passive building blocks with capacitive touch sensing techniques and deliberate physical forgiving to retain the merits of being both batteryless and wireless. The presented research artifacts embody the interaction designs and elucidate scalability challenges in integrating touchscreen interactions into this emerging tangible user interface.

This paper presents BioFidget, a biofeedback system that integrates physiological sensing and display into a smart fidget spinner for respiration training. We present a simple yet novel hardware design that transforms a fidget spinner into 1) a nonintrusive heart rate variability (HRV) sensor, 2) an electromechanical respiration sensor, and 3) an information display. The combination of these features enables users to engage in respiration training through designed tangible and embodied interactions, without requiring them to wear additional physiological sensors. The results of this empirical user study prove that the respiration training method reduces stress, and the proposed system meets the requirements of sensing validity and engagement with 32 participants in a practical setting.