Embedding social robots in educational and/or childcare settings has potential to engage children while supporting caregivers. However, little is known about the practical, long-term integration of robots in such settings. Our work addresses this gap through an ethnographic study that adopts a year-long perspective toward a socially assistive robot in an inclusive daycare with a four-month robot deployment phase. Through Thematic Analysis, we highlight children's ability to develop a variety of self-determined interactions with the robot, while unveiling caregivers' need for its integration into structured routines such as meal times, as well as challenges for robustness of the robot in our research setting. On this basis, we make recommendations for the design of social robots for daycare environments.

Virtual Reality (VR) promises to enable people to fully immerse themselves in virtual worlds.However, the body-centricity of VR results in accessibility concerns for people with physical disabilities.In our work, we build on existing research that focuses on physical accessibility and discuss the digital layer that includes the design of avatars and virtual worlds, and the experiential layer that addresses the experience that VR provides for people with physical disabilities.We present findings from a qualitative study (N=16) that combined semi-structured interviews with hands-on exploration of state-of-the-art VR hardware and applications.Leveraging Qualitative Content Analysis, our results show that physical, digital, and experiential accessibility concerns are often intertwined and must be seen in conjunction.Additionally, we show that application contexts (e.g., gaming or social VR) shape accessibility concerns and preferences.On this basis, we contribute a nuanced discussion of the complexity of VR accessibility and examine context-specific accessibility preferences using the examples of VR gaming and social VR that need to be accounted for to create accessible and enriching VR experiences.

Infinite scrolling on social media platforms is designed to encourage prolonged engagement, leading users to spend more time than desired, which can provoke negative emotions. Interventions to mitigate infinite scrolling have shown initial success, yet users become desensitized due to the lack of contextual relevance. Understanding how contextual factors influence intervention effectiveness remains underexplored. We conducted a 7-day user study (N=72) investigating how these contextual factors affect users' reactance and responsiveness to interventions during infinite scrolling. Our study revealed an interplay, with contextual factors such as being at home, sleepiness, and valence playing significant roles in the intervention's effectiveness. Low valence coupled with being at home slows down the responsiveness to interventions, and sleepiness lowers reactance towards interventions, increasing user acceptance of the intervention. Overall, our work contributes to a deeper understanding of user responses toward interventions and paves the way for developing more effective interventions during infinite scrolling.

Spectating sports matches or concerts is a popular activity, but these public live events have yet to become more accessible to people with disabilities. Inspecting the corresponding interactive seat plan before purchasing tickets online can be necessary to avoid or prepare for barriers at these venues. Unfortunately, these representations often lack valuable accessibility information. To explore how this can affect the disabled community, we leverage autoethnography to provide an in-depth introspective account through the lens of a person with a mobility disability. We apply Thematic Analysis to synthesise field notes from his research diary. The crafted themes showcase the lacking accessibility support in seat plans and illustrate the first author's adaptation strategies to facilitate accessible experiences. We further contextualise his social relationships as a key factor throughout this process. Grounded in these results, we reflect on the provision of accessibility information, the categorisation of seats, and interdependent relationships within and through these systems.

Non-verbal children are often provided with non-verbal communication cards (NVCCs) to share their needs. However, in busy spaces that prioritize verbal communication, for example, a daycare, this may place them at a disadvantage in comparison with verbal peers. In this work, we introduce the concept of a Socially Mediating Robot (SMR), acting as a communicational intermediary that verbalizes NVCC input. Thereby, we want to explore whether non-verbal children can be empowered by giving them an additional way of expressing themselves in a dynamic, buzzing environment. In an exploratory interview study with six participants professionally working with children, we then provide first insights on the feasibility of our concept from the perspective of caregiving staff. Thereby, we lay the groundwork for evaluating the concept in an ongoing field study in an inclusive daycare context.

Attending public sports events is a popular leisure activity that has yet to become more accessible for people with limited mobility. In our work, we address the role that technology, and especially, digital ticketing infrastructures play in the individual preparation for attending football matches and the experiences that disabled fans have at football stadia. Building on autoethnographic work on attending large public events with a disability, we report findings from semi-structured interviews with people with limited mobility (N=12). We apply Reflexive Thematic Analysis to craft four main themes, (1) showcasing the importance of familiarity with the processes, (2) illustrating the (in)voluntary separation of disabled and non-disabled people in current (ticketing) infrastructures, (3) highlighting social contacts as key contributor but dependency on other people also as obstruction of accessibility, and (4) contextualising the role of interactive seat plans for ticketing. Building upon these findings, we contribute an account on the experiences of people with limited mobility and the examination of current and prospective technology for this purpose with a focus on ticketing and seat plans, thereby also appraising previous findings from autoethnography.

Augmented Reality (AR) can alter environments and steer attention. While prior work dominantly focuses on exploring performances of augmentations, this work aims to understand the societal impact of AR in complex social situations. Focusing on prosocial helping behaviour, we created two scenarios and designed five augmentations aiming to motivate a user to help. We wanted to understand (1) the impact on situation perception and (2) the impact on the social structure. In an online video experiment (n=294), we found that augmenting can impact anxiety about the situation and significantly increase the perceived reason to help being directed towards the augmentation. Similarly, we found that the helped rated the "reason" and "thankfulness" significantly higher towards AR than the helper, creating a disagreement around agency and responsibility. We discuss the implications of AR in complex social structures and how responsibility and agency will become important when embedding AR in our social lives.

Today's social media (SM) platforms are toolkits consisting of features with different use cases, some strongly related to habitual and regretful use. Especially Infinite Scrolling (IS) has been reported to make users feel like they are being caught in a loop, regretfully elongating SM sessions. We investigated and defined this loop while unveiling the processes that make users break it. Based on a one-week-long field study (N=46), we unfolded and categorized general reasons for leaving social media and related those to IS. In light of our findings, we argue that SM interventions should not only focus on the app but incorporate the user's context, as most reasons to break SM sessions were not related to the app but the user's general context. Our findings and prior work also indicate the coexistence of multiple loops, which we define as inner (intra-session) loops surrounded by an outer (habitual) loop.

Social Media (SM) has shown that we adapt our communication and disclosure behaviors to available technological opportunities. Head-mounted Augmented Reality (AR) will soon allow to effortlessly display the information we disclosed not isolated from our physical presence (e.g., on a smartphone) but visually attached to the human body. In this work, we explore how the medium (AR vs. Smartphone), our role (being augmented vs. augmenting), and characteristics of information types (e.g., level of intimacy, self-disclosed vs. non-self-disclosed) impact the users’ comfort when displaying personal information. Conducting an online survey (N=148), we found that AR technology and being augmented negatively impacted this comfort. Additionally, we report that AR mitigated the effects of information characteristics compared to those they had on smartphones. In light of our results, we discuss that information augmentation should be built on consent and openness, focusing more on the comfort of the augmented rather than the technological possibilities.

Autonomous vehicles could improve mobility, safety, and inclusion in traffic. While this technology seems within reach, its successful introduction depends on the intended user’s acceptance. A substantial factor for this acceptance is trust in the autonomous vehicle’s capabilities. Visualizing internal information processed by an autonomous vehicle could calibrate this trust by enabling the perception of the vehicle’s detection capabilities (and its failures) while only inducing a low cognitive load. Additionally, the simultaneously raised situation awareness could benefit potential take-overs. We report the results of two comparative online studies on visualizing semantic segmentation information for the human user of autonomous vehicles. Effects on trust, cognitive load, and situation awareness were measured using a simulation (N=32) and state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation on a pre-recorded real-world video (N=41). Results show that the visualization using Augmented Reality increases situation awareness while remaining low cognitive load.

Augmented Reality (AR) glasses equip users with the tools to modify the visual appearance of their surrounding environment. This might severely impact interpersonal communication, as the conversational partners will no longer share the same visual perception of reality. Grounded in color-in-context theory, we present a potential AR application scenario in which users can modify the color of the environment to achieve subconscious benefits. In a consecutive online survey (N=64), we measured the user’s comfort, acceptance of altering and being altered, and how it is impacted by being able to perceive or not perceive the alteration. We identified significant differences depending on (1) who or what is the target of the alteration, (2) which body part is altered, and (3) which relationship the conversational partners share. In light of our quantitative and qualitative findings, we discuss ethical and practical implications for future devices and applications that employ visual alterations.

Adoption and use of smartphone-based asynchronous voice messaging has increased substantially in recent years. However, this communication channel has a strong tendency to polarize. To provide an understanding of this modality, we started by conducting an online survey (n=1,003) exploring who is using voice messages, their motives, and utilization. In a consecutive field study (n=6), we analyzed voice messaging behavior of six avid voice message users in a two-week field study, followed by semi-structured interviews further exploring themes uncovered in our survey. Conducting a thematic analysis, we identified four themes driving voice messaging usage: convenience, para-linguistic features, situational constraints and the receiver. Voice messaging helps to overcome issues of mobile communication, through ease of use, asynchronous implementation, and voices’ rich emotional context. It also was perceived as enabling more efficient communication, helps to handle secondary occupations, and better facilitates maintenance of close relationships. Despite the increased effort required to listen to a voice message, they complement communication with people we care about.