Games empowering active engagement in real-world climate adaptation measures are underexplored. Yet, bottom-up engagement is crucial for addressing natural hazard impacts at the community and individual levels. Our work employed an iterative research for and through co-design approach to develop a locally adapted tabletop game for a community-led educational Center. We tested the game onsite (n = 254), followed by two surveys, one immediately after playing (n = 57) and one conducted two weeks later (n = 11), assessing players’ awareness, and sense of empowerment and agency. Results show an increase in participants’ awareness of local countermeasures, a sense of agency, and their participatory efficacy in contributing to their own, their family’s, and their community’s climate resilience. Our work contributes a transferable game concept that reflects complex real-world interdependencies, empowering a sense of agency through practice-based game mechanics.

lives severely, requiring everyone living in risk areas to become

Meaningful interactions positively impact users’ meaning-making and feeling socially and culturally connected with their surroundings. However, creating such interactions is a continuous, complex challenge. We present the Traces in Use design concept supporting interface contextualization for meaningful human–environment interactions in public places. The concept was developed and evaluated in three steps: (I) exploring traces of use characteristics as inspiration for design, (II) introducing the concept definition, its theoretical evaluation, and a supporting framework, and (III) practically evaluating the concept by developing, contextualizing, and testing three interfaces (a lion interface, a drum, and a storyteller) in two empirical field studies (N = 40). The results show that the concept promotes meaningful interaction by supporting users’ feelings of socio-cultural connectedness and meaning-making. With this, our work contributes the Traces in Use design concept, its development, and its methodological application for meaningful human–environment interactions and interface contextualization in public places.

Object detection tasks still often require manual image analysis. Using Machine Learning (ML) instead creates accountability challenges, necessitating experts for model refinement, which is costly and takes time. We investigate integrating crowd knowledge as a cost-effective alternative. While human capabilities in recognizing complex patterns and perceiving variations can still outperform machines and improve an imperfect ML model, ML predictions can compensate for the crowd’s lack of expertise. Our investigation (N=28 non-expert) in oil spill detection shows that adopting an ML-assisted UI elevates precision and recall by over 11% and increases efficiency by 29% compared to a non-assisted UI. Considering agreement among non-expert crowd workers further improved precision by 8% and recall by almost 5%, which is also substantially beyond pure ML performance. Our work contributes an approach for combining crowd knowledge and ML to advance human-AI collaboration in oil spill detection.

While collaboration in shared extended reality spaces has been extensively explored, larger environments like entire floors or buildings have garnered less attention. To address this gap, spatial navigation and collaboration across realities must be made possible so that users can find each other and foster shared spatial understanding independent from reality. Current developments target either navigation or collaboration but lack the combination. In this poster, we present an extended reality remote collaboration system using an augmented reality (AR) based indoor navigation for on-site and a Building Information Model (BIM) of the physical environment Virtual Reality (VR) system for remote users. We conducted a user study with ten participants (five pairs) to gather initial insights into the system’s usability and preferences for collaborative tools. The results offer initial insights into creating shared spatial understanding across realities. Our work contributes to a collaborative XR navigation system for extensive shared spaces.

Tangible devices and interaction in Extended Reality (XR) increase immersion and enable users to perform tasks more intuitively, accurately and joyfully across the reality-virtuality continuum. Upon reviewing the literature, we noticed no clear trend for a publication venue, as well as no standard in evaluating the effects of tangible XR. To position the topic of tangible XR in the TEI community, we propose a hands-on studio, where participants will bring in their own ideas for tangible XR from their application fields, and develop prototypes with the cutting-edge technology and a selection of virtual assets provided. Additionally, we will collectively reflect upon evaluation methods on tangible XR, and aim to find a consensus of a core evaluation suite. With this, we aim to foster a practical understanding and spark new developments in tangible XR and its use cases within the TEI community.

Social games benefit from social connectedness between players because it improves the gaming experience and increases enjoyment. In virtual reality (VR), various approaches, such as avatars, are developed for multi-player games to increase social connectedness. However, these approaches are lacking in single-player games. To increase social connectedness in such games, our work explores the visualization of physiological data from asynchronous players, i.e., electrocardiogram (ECG). We identified two visualization dimensions, the number of players, and the visualization style, after a design workshop with experts (N=4) and explored them in a single-user virtual escape room game. We spatially and temporally integrated the visualizations and compared two times two visualizations against a baseline condition without visualization in a within-subject lab study (N=34). All but one visualization significantly increased participants’ feelings of social connectedness. Heart icons triggered the strongest feeling of connectedness, understanding, and perceived support in playing the game.

COVID-19 caused an abrupt switch from face-to-face to online teaching. This led to unknown challenges and consequences for students and lecturers. In the first semester after its outbreak, we developed a messenger-based chatbot to perform an experience sampling study to evaluate students’ well-being and experiences (n = 31) with the radical changes in higher education. Finding a decrease in students’ perceived motivation but an increase in productivity, we conducted a follow-up survey to compare the development a year later (n = 41). Our results revealed two main student profiles, one feeling severely impacted by the persisting social distance in their study performance and the other appreciating the flexibility and expended free time due to the changes in the teaching formats. Based on our findings, we introduce implications for the overall design of higher education and show the benefits and challenges of combining chatbot-enabled experience sampling with traditional surveys.

Embedded interfaces support active indexing, the process of making sense of the experienced. While this supports the creation of meaningful relationships, findings are limited on how it could support sustaining the significance of historical places. We selected two historical places of daily use and developed two AR apps for each. The apps aimed at fostering participants’ indexing and meaningful connection to the places by presenting their history. One app offered passive, informative content. The other displayed an interactive, moral dilemma emphasizing the places’ social values. We tested the apps in two between-subjects studies with N=42 participants in total. We explored how participants ’ historical understanding can be improved by embedding our interfaces on five levels (spatially, physically, contextually, historically, and morally). We found that the morally embedded AR stories supported active indexing stronger than the passive ones and argued that they could foster meaningful relationships between users and historical places.

Creating social Virtual Environments (VEs) is an ongoing challenge. Traces of prior human interactions, or traces of use, are used in Physical Environments (PEs) to create more meaningful relationships with the PE and the people within it. In this paper, we explore how the concept of traces of use can be transferred from PEs to VEs to increase known success factors for social VEs, such as increased social presence. First, we introduce a conceptualization and discussion ($N=4$ expert interviews) of a "Traces in VEs" framework. Second, we evaluate the framework in two lab studies ($N=46$ in total), exploring the effect of traces in (i) VE vs. PE, and (ii) on social presence. Our findings confirm that traces increase the feeling of social presence. However, their meaning may differ depending on the environment. Our framework offers a structured overview of relevant components and relationships that need to be considered when designing meaningful user experiences in VE using traces. Thus, our work is valuable for practitioners and researchers who systematically want to create social VEs.

Plaster busts are common exhibition pieces in museums, but they usually are off-limits for touch. While modern exhibition concepts increasingly involve interaction, this rarely includes touching a plaster bust. However, there may be a wealth of information associated with these cultural heritage objects, e.g., their making and their creator’s craftsmanship, which tangible interaction could make accessible right on the object. We equipped plaster replicas of such a bust with capacitive sensors and developed a tangible prototype in collaboration with two domain experts from the art museum “Staatliche Antikensammlungen” (Munich, Germany), a curator and a sculptor, in an iterative design approach. Then we tested it in a lab study (N=12) and an in situ study in the museum (N=20). We describe our technical approach, which we also made public as a git project1, and discuss our study results about busts as tangible interfaces in the art of sculpting.

The urban realm is currently undergoing a transformation in which cities are being laced with sensors and networks of ever-connected devices. At the same time, more and more novel and advanced materials are finding their way into interaction design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research, offering us new interaction possibilities. In this half-day online studio, attendees will have the opportunity to exchange and reflect on urban interaction designs for user engagement based on a set of novel, unconventional, or omnipresent materials in urban environments. We will further collect historical, public, and community locations of different social and societal meaning. Participants will be asked to develop hands-on concepts and use cases for the selected locations through a material-centered approach and think about new levels of user-environment engagement to extend and explore the current design space. The formulated concepts and use cases will be recorded in an online collaboration tool with the prospect to publish them as enhances for the new generation of media architecture.

Concrete is a ubiquitous material in urban environments and increasingly used by industry and the maker movement. However, there is little research about its affordance and its potential for embedded User Interfaces (UI). In our ongoing work, we investigate different manufacturing processes and design strategies to change and adapt the affordances of concrete to make it appear interactive. We tested three interface elements, a button, a scroll wheel, and a slider, with 33 participants in a lab elicitation study. Each was created in two versions following two design strategies, one with a more natural look, the other more abstract. Five participants then bodystormed ideas with the prototypes in an outdoor environment. Based on our explorations, we discuss design considerations for creating concrete interfaces including the potential of both design strategies and present different application scenarios.

Traces of use in public environments show the behaviour patterns of the masses. Taking advantage of this quality, we want to use such traces as design tool to indicate possible interactions in e.g. newly built areas while keeping a natural and calm environment. Due to current lacking knowledge about such traces, this work aims at understanding the perception of traces of use in public places. Therefore we collected a total of 182 pictures of traces of use in urban environments. A focus group discussed and classified a preselected set of pictures. In an online picture viewing survey, 18 different pictures were reviewed for pattern identification (N= 32-52). Overlaps were visualized in heatmaps. We contribute an analysis of which public traces of use are easy to recognize with great agreement and which are not.

Most currently existing tools for cognitive memory therapy require physical interaction or at least the presence of another person. The goal of this paper is to investigate whether a social robot might be an acceptable solution for a more inclusive therapy for people with memory disorder and severe physical limitations. Applying a user-centered design approach, we conducted semi-structured interviews with five healthcare professionals; four medical doctors and a psychologist, in three iterations followed by a focus group activity. An analysis of the collected data suggests several implications for design with an emphasis on embodiment, social skills, interaction, and memory training exercises.