Office sensor systems often fail to present environmental data related to office well-being in ways that are accessible and comprehensible for non-expert users. To address this, we introduce Situated Data Sensemaking, a concept that enhances individuals’ ability to understand and use data by embedding it within their physical environment. Implemented through OfficeSense, a system that physicalizes environmental parameters—light levels, sound, air quality (CO2), and temperature—within office spaces, this concept was evaluated in a 4-week study (N=11) including a baseline week. OfficeSense influenced perceived data literacy and understanding of office well-being. Findings indicate that Situated Data Sensemaking supported participants in aligning their perceptions of environmental conditions with real-time data, influenced by spatial and temporal contexts, personal preferences, and collaborative interactions. This study demonstrates that embedding data in shared physical spaces can enhance users’ confidence in interpreting environmental data and foster collective awareness of workplace conditions.

Publicly displaying personal tracking data can promote healthier lifestyles, with most existing research focusing on digital visualizations. However, public physicalizations have been shown to attract more attention and foster greater engagement. Despite this, few studies in this area have utilized personal physical activity data as input or explored its impact on motivating data generators’ physical activity. To address this gap, we designed PlanetWalker, a system that visualizes users’ walking steps on their phone and shows the visualization publicly through a digital display, as well as medium- and large-scale public physicalizations as probes. The probes were deployed following the Wizard of Oz method in sequence during a six-week in-the-wild study. Through evaluations with users generating data and passersby, our findings show how public physicalizations can improve motivation, facilitate social interaction, and increase engagement. We conclude by discussing the design directions for supporting the public presentation of personal data through public physicalization to motivate physical activity and provide design trade-offs and suggestions on the physicality and scale of the medium.

Smart solutions provide increasing quality and availability of data. This brings new challenges for designers as it offers novel design opportunities and interlaces disciplines. At the same time, physical inactivity is a big societal challenge and dedicated urban planning and design can contribute to more active lifestyles. In this paper, we investigate how user-generated big data can support designers in shaping more activity-friendly and adaptive environments, addressing both timely challenges. Bridging the fields of HCI and urbanism, we introduce two data lenses. The individual lens primarily builds on empathic design skills and calls for a highly personal approach. The collective lens emphasizes systematic and holistic design skills, focusing on creating overview and surfacing collective interests. Through exploratory data visualizations, using a large dataset from a run-tracking smartphone application combined with public data sources, and a workshop, we investigate how these lenses can yield meaningful insights. We discuss the value of these lenses to the urban design and HCI communities and address the challenges and opportunities that arise at the cross-section of these perspectives.

Sensors in offices mainly measure environmental data, missing qualitative insights into office workers’ perceptions. This opens the opportunity for active individual participation in data collection. To promote reflection on office well-being while overcoming experience sampling challenges in terms of privacy, notification, and display overload, and in-the-moment data collection, we developed Click-IO. Click-IO is a tangible, privacy-sensitive, mobile experience sampling tool that collects contextual information. We evaluated Click-IO for 20-days. The system enabled real-time reflections for office workers, promoting self-awareness of their environment and well-being. Its non-digital design ensured privacy-sensitive feedback collection, while its mobility facilitated in-the-moment feedback. Based on our findings, we identify design recommendations for the development of mobile experience sampling tools. Moreover, the integration of contextual data with environmental sensor data presented a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ experiences. This research contributes to the development of experience sampling tools and sensor integration for understanding office well-being.

Data is often inaccessible for non-expert users, leading to a lack of data transparency and speculation in the understanding and interpretation of data, not providing personal value to individuals. The SensorBricks toolkit was evaluated during 5 workshops (N = 20) to learn how an IoT toolkit can support the development of data literacy. The SensorBricks toolkit introduced data to individuals in a fun, accessible and easy way, creating a low boundary for users to interact with data, sensors and output modalities. The toolkit helped individuals to reflect on the role of data in their environment. The collaborative aspect gave individuals the option to discuss the data and learn from each other’s experiences helping users to create a meaningful interpretation and shared understanding of sensor data. The combined digital and data physicalization data representation gives individuals both awareness and in-detail information, creating an understandable and informative way of presenting data.

Office well-being aims to explore and support a healthy, balanced and active work style in office environments. Recent work on tangible user interfaces has started to explore the role of physical, tangible interfaces as active interventions to explore how to tackle problems such as inactive work and lifestyles, and increasingly sedentary behaviours. We identify a fragmented research landscape on tangible Office well-being interventions, missing the relationship between interventions, data, design strategies, and outcomes, and behaviour change techniques. Based on the analysis of 40 papers, we identify 7 classifications in tangible Office well-being interventions and analyse the intervention based on their role and foundation in behaviour change. Based on the analysis, we present design considerations for the development of future tangible Office well-being design interventions and present an overview of the current field and future research into tangible Office well-being interventions to design for a healthier and active office environment.

Sensing technology is increasingly used to collect data about the workplace to provide insights into building performance and work activities. While such systems provide meaningful insights, they are a ’black box’ in nature considering people as passive data subjects with no input into the sensing and data collection process. We propose a human-data interaction approach where human workers can opt-in using an ego-centric sensor platform – SensorBadge – that provides tools to collect and inspect personal office data. We describe a field exploration of Sensorbadge to understand the wearability, usability, and usefulness of ego-centric data collection. Our results show that office sensing systems should fit seamlessly in the office routine of individuals, without asking for extra effort or creating conflicts with work patterns. Data should be classified and presented against a frame of reference for comparison and visualized to create understandable and actionable representations with personal control of their office environment.

Modern office environments foster sitting, a major public health risk, with physical inactivity being the fourth cause of death worldwide. This provocative pictorial presents the design explorations and bodily experimentations culminating in The Office Jungle, a critical and speculative redesign of the office environment that encourages physical activity by embracing wildness. The Office Jungle is a design exemplar of a “wild” office space presented as a suspended geodesic structure. It is built to experienc e how our office environment and our behaviour at work affect each other. We advocate that bringing wildness into office spaces will create more durable office environments that foster movement. With this pictorial, we aim to spark discussion amongst designers to think in new ways and to consider new opportunities to design for workplaces that integrate physical activity with work.

Despite an intention to exercise, it remains a challenge for many people to establish a workout routine over a period of time. Amongst identified barriers and enablers to exercise, getting dressed for a workout is considered as one of the tipping points of actually going. Implementing the Aesthetic of Friction in this specific context, could imply the right course of action for the user, while it also allows freedom and encourages meaning-making. In this Research-through-Design project, we designed an interactive shrinking hanger, that implements these key principles, to encourage exercise motivation. We followed an iterative process focusing on the aesthetics of the interaction to find out how a careful consideration of the look and feel of an interactive artefact influences the acceptance of the implemented friction. We document the design process of this aesthetics of friction exemplar, and reflect on how to implement friction in design.

The increased popularity of recreational sports, like running, led to the development of numerous technologies supporting people in their training. However, in their current form and interaction, these take a rather standardized approach focusing on quantified data tracking displayed through screens or audio. In this paper, we explore how dynamic data physicalization through a shape-changing interface can open the design space of exercise feedback. Relying on an expert study on the aesthetics of interaction (N=23), we designed Laina, a shape-changing art piece presenting physicalized running data through a slow feedback mechanism. We deployed Laina at 3 participant's home, during a series of 3-weeks field studies. Results show that Laina allows for deep reflection, anticipation and exploration of running behavior. The aim of our paper is to provide insights on the use of slow feedback mechanisms for exercise-related products, through the design of a dynamic data physicalization artefact.

Promoting healthy lifestyles is an essential endeavor for public health. The design of active urban environments can be an effective medium to nudge people into moving. With technology increasingly integrated into our daily lives, designers have access to more data than ever. In this pictorial, we explore the design space of interActive environments (contraction of ‘interactive’ and ‘active’); places designed to increase the physical activity of users or passers-by through the use of interactive technology. Through sketches, a benchmark of existing concepts and an analysis of designed artefacts, we map the different intervention levels, interaction modalities, behavior change strategies and technological opportunities to design such interActive environments. With this work, we invite the community to consider how digital technology can help understand and shape human behavior in urban environments, and provide inspiration to designers and practitioners.

This pictorial presents a design exploration of On-Skin Interfaces for recreational running. By integrating principles of interaction design, art and psychology, we explore the design of unconventional interfaces that facilitate the intuitive understanding of biofeedback and physiological-related information. We explored how principles from agency and bodily ownership can be applied in the design of sport- related wearables. Through our embodied prototyping journey, we gained insights on the implications of using the skin as an interactive design material. We focused on diverse materiality explorations to uncover and highlight the possibilities and challenges of materializing both functional and appealing On-Skin Interfaces. We synthesize and refl on our theoretical and practical explorations and deliver actionable insights for this growing fi of bodily and unconventional interfaces.

There is increased interest in reducing sedentary behavior of office workers to combat the negative health effects of prolonged sitting. Walking meetings offer a promising solution to this problem as they facilitate a physically active way of working. To inform future development of technologies supporting these type of meetings, in-depth qualitative insights into people's experiences of walking meetings are needed. We conducted semi-structured walking interviews (N=16) to identify key drivers and barriers for walking meetings in a living lab setting by using the 'WorkWalk'. The 'WorkWalk' is a 1.8 km walking route indicated by a dotted blue line with outdoor meeting points, integrated into the room booking system. Our findings provide insights into how walking meetings are experienced and affect the set-up and social dynamics of meetings. We offer design recommendations for the development of future technologies and service design elements to support walking meetings and active ways of working.

Participating in physical activity (PA) is beneficial for adolescents' physical and mental development. Therefore, many studies have been conducted to design and evaluate interactive interventions to facilitate adolescents' PA. Despite the knowledge produced by this large number of studies, the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) still lacks a comprehensive set of guidelines to guide our design processes, help us make informed design decisions, as well as provide niche for innovation. This paper reports a systematic literature review of studies on technology-supported interventions in adolescents' PA. We reviewed 25 design related studies in HCI over the past 10 years, analyzing 1) the process phases of design practice, 2) the design requirements and related design decisions, and 3) how these phases and requirements are internally related to each other and what are their influence on design value. Our findings suggest four design phases with seven design requirements and its corresponding design decisions emerged in the process of design. Furthermore, we outline a framework to demonstrate the internal relations of design requirements. We generalize opportunities and challenges for supporting the aforementioned design decisions making, and implementing the findings for future design and research on technology-supported adolescents' PA.

Physical Education (PE) is beneficial for students' mental and physical health, however, teenagers are increasingly becoming less motivated to actively participate in the current form of PE. Motivational studies show that collective physical activity augmented by playful interactions could encourage more participation and social engagement in physical activities (PA). In this paper, we present a within-subject field study with 20 teenagers formed into five groups sized equally. The study is conducted using Shuttlezap, a prototype that provides real-time playful audio augmentation to the process of the activity. Results show that the teenagers enjoyed playful audio augmentation and were socially engaged with an enhancement of their perception of competence. By further comparing the conditions between with and without the audio augmentation, we found that the playful audio augmentation positively contributed to the playfulness in terms of perceived relaxation and expression. We conclude with design implications for social play in the context of PE for teenagers.