The identity design of artificial agents carries growing ethical, psychological, and cultural weight, as ubiquitous language models and diverse robotic forms are blended into everyday use. However, structured approaches to designing coherent and interpretable artificial identities remain limited. To address urgent challenges in artificial identity design, including harmful stereotypes and deceptive practices, we introduce the Identity Design (ID) Framework and an accompanying research agenda. Drawing on emerging work on artificial identity in human-robot interaction and taking an interdisciplinary perspective, we propose twelve design principles across three levels: individual (recognisability, behavioural consistency, identity continuity, memory, persistent goals), group (membership signalling, social alignment, role clarity), and societal (benevolence, artificiality, social justice, transparency). The research agenda outlines open questions around the operationalisation and measurement of identity, social dynamics, and ethical considerations for identity design. Together, they lay the groundwork for future research and responsible practice in robotic, virtual, and multi-embodied agents.

Current discussion on AI often presents binary for/against stances, making it difficult to foster nuanced discourse. But how can we as designers, developers, researchers, and artists communicate the nuances of our work to non-experts? Art can be a powerful medium for public engagement prompting reflection on complex topics. We examine audience engagement with Cat Royale, an artwork that invited audiences to reflect on AI, robotics, and the trust we place in them. We show that constructing and presenting an art installation as a deliberately ambiguous interface can provoke and encourage critical reflection, and we argue for the importance of making abstract technologies, such as AI, tangible and relatable through concrete examples, including artworks. Finally, we examine forms of ambiguity that arise at the intersection of AI and public engagement, and propose two new kinds relevant to the future of beyond-human interaction in HCI: moral ambiguity and ambiguity of species.

Being guided from one place to another is a pervasive social practice that connects deeply with socially aware robot navigation. We examine how robots come to feature within the organisation of these established and well-worn leading and following practices, practices which are assembled 'in place' by the efforts of individuals and groups that are using robot guides. We deployed mobile robots in a museum context to provide additional information for visitors around multiple sequential exhibits. Our ethnomethodological video-based analysis of interaction centres on how the social organisation of being guided was practically managed by visitors: in initiation of following, doing following, and finding a place to stop. Our study shows how following and being led is more than just a mechanical activity, and describe the implications for socially aware robot navigation in addressing novel technical challenges that a shift in understanding following-leading phenomena presents.

Telepresence robots have the potential to change our experiences in galleries and museums, allowing for a range of hybrid interactions for visitors and museum professionals, improving accessibility, offering activities or information, and providing a range of practical use cases (e.g. the robots augmenting museum exhibits).We present the results of 3 qualitative studies conducted in the UK exploring the acceptability (1 -interviews with museum professionals with no previous exposure to telepresence), acceptance (2 -focus groups for initial exposure to telepresence robots), and adoption (3 -interviews with museum professionals with long-term exposure to

Large Language Models (LLMs) are seemingly infiltrating every domain, and the legal context is no exception. In this paper, we present the results of three experiments (total N=288) that investigated lay people's willingness to act upon, and their ability to discriminate between, LLM- and lawyer-generated legal advice. In Experiment 1, participants judged their willingness to act on legal advice when the source of the advice was either known or unknown. When the advice source was unknown, participants indicated that they were significantly more willing to act on the LLM-generated advice. This result was replicated in Experiment 2. Intriguingly, despite participants indicating higher willingness to act on LLM-generated advice in Experiments 1 and 2, participants discriminated between the LLM- and lawyer-generated texts significantly above chance-level in Experiment 3. Lastly, we discuss potential explanations and risks of our findings, limitations and future work, and the importance of language complexity and real-world comparability.

Formal Modelling is often used as part of the design and testing process of software development to ensure that components operate within suitable bounds even in unexpected circumstances. We conducted a user study evaluation of predictive formal modelling (PFM) at runtime in a human-swarm mission to determine the benefit of PFM on performance and human-swarm interaction. A total of 180 participants were recruited to perform the role of aerial swarm operators delivering parcels to target locations in a simulation environment. The PFM model was integrated into the simulation software to inform the operator of the estimated mission completion time given the current number of drones deployed. The operator could increase the number of parcels delivered in any timestep by adding drones, which also increased costs, thus requiring the use of the minimum number of drones necessary to complete the task in the given time. We collected user feedback using standard survey questionnaires and measured performance using data obtained from the Human and Robot Interactive Swarm (HARIS) simulator. Our results show that PFM increased the performance of the human swarm team without significantly increasing the operators’ workload or affecting the system’s usability.

While ethical challenges are widely discussed in HCI, far less is reported about the ethical processes that researchers routinely navigate. We reflect on a multispecies project that negotiated an especially complex ethical approval process. Cat Royale was an artist-led exploration of creating an artwork to engage audiences in exploring trust in autonomous systems. The artwork took the form of a robot that played with three cats. Gaining ethical approval required an extensive dialogue with three Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) covering computer science, veterinary science and animal welfare, raising tensions around the welfare of the cats, perceived benefits and appropriate methods, and reputational risk to the University. To reveal these tensions we introduce beneficiary-epistemology space, that makes explicit who benefits from research (humans or animals) and underlying epistemologies. Positioning projects and IRBs in this space can help clarify tensions and highlight opportunities to recruit additional expertise.

We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present the project’s design process, encompassing various interconnected components, including the cats, the robot and its autonomous systems, the custom end-effectors and robot attachments, the diverse roles of the humans-in-the-loop, and the custom-designed enclosure. Subsequently, we provide a detailed account of key moments during the deployment and discuss the design implications for future multispecies systems. Specifically, we argue that designing the technology and its interactions is not sufficient, but that it is equally important to consider the design of the ‘world’ in which the technology operates. Finally, we highlight the necessity of human involvement in areas such as breakdown recovery, animal welfare, and their role as audience.

Abstract ChatGPT, a sophisticated chatbot system by OpenAI, gained significant attention and adoption in 2022 and 2023. By generating human-like conversations, it attracted over 100 million monthly users; however, there are concerns about the social impact of ChatGPT, including panic, misinformation and ethics. Twitter has become a platform for expressing views on ChatGPT and popular NLP approaches like topic modelling, sentiment analysis and emotion detection are commonly used to study public discourses on Twitter. While these approaches have limitations, an analytical process of existing best practices captures the evolving nature of these views. Previous studies have examined early reactions and topics associated with ChatGPT on Twitter but have not fully explored the combination of topics, sentiment and emotions, nor have they explicitly followed existing best practices. This study provides an overview of the views expressed on Twitter about ChatGPT by analysing 88,058 tweets from November 2022 to March 2023 to see if panic and concern were replicated in Twitter discourses. The topics covered human-like text generation, chatbot development, writing assistance, data training, efficiency, impact on business and cryptocurrency. Overall, the sentiment was predominantly positive, indicating that concerns surrounding ChatGPT were not widely replicated. However, sentiment fluctuated, with a decline observed around the launch of ChatGPT Plus. The discourse saw consistent patterns of trust and fear, with trust maintaining a steady presence until a decline potentially influenced by concerns about biases and misinformation. We discuss how our findings build upon existing research regarding ChatGPT by providing trajectories of topics, sentiment and emotions.

The emphasis on one-to-one speak/wait spoken conversational interaction with intelligent agents leads to long pauses between conversational turns, undermines the flow and naturalness of the interaction, and undermines the user experience. Despite ground breaking advances in the area of generating and understanding natural language with techniques such as LLMs, conversational interaction has remained relatively overlooked. In this workshop we will discuss and review the challenges, recent work and potential impact of improving conversational interaction with artificial systems. We hope to share experiences of poor human/system interaction, best practices with third party tools, and generate design guidance for the community.

Mobile Robotic Telepresence (MRP) systems afford remote communication with an embodied physicality and autonomous mobility, which is thought to be useful for creating a sense of presence in hybrid activities. In this paper, drawing on phenomenology, we interviewed seven long term users of MRP to understand the lived experience of participating in hybrid spaces through a telepresence robot. The users' accounts show how the capabilities of the robot impact interactions, and how telepresence differs from in-person presence. Whilst not feeling as if they were really there, users felt present when they were being able to participate in local action and be treated as present. They also report standing out and being subject to behaviour amounting to 'othering'. We argue that these experiences point to a need for future work on telepresence to focus on giving remote users the means to exercise autonomy in ways that enable them to participate --- to be 'in on the action' --- rather than in ways that simply simulate being in-person.

Increasingly, robots are adopted for routine tasks such as cleaning and disinfection of public spaces, raising questions about attitudes and trust of professional cleaners who might in future have robots as teammates, and whether the general public feels reassured when disinfection is carried out by robots. In this paper, we present the results of a mixed-methods user study exploring how trust and reassurance by both professional cleaners and members of the public is affected by the use of a UV-C disinfection robot and information about its performance after disinfecting a simulated classroom. The results show a range of insights for those designing and wishing to deploy UV-C robots: we found that trust and reassurance are affected by information about the UV-C robot’s task performance, with more information coinciding with significantly more agreement to be able to judge that the robot is doing a good job. However, care should be taken when designing information about task performance to avoid misinterpretation. Overall, the results suggest a generally positive picture regarding the use of UV-C disinfecting robots and that cleaning professionals would be happy to have them as their teammates; however, there were also some concerns regarding the effect on less-skilled jobs. Taken together, our results provide considerations to make UV-C robots welcomed by cleaning teams as well as to provide reassurance to space users.

IoT solutions is their long-term socio-technical infrastructural nature, and therefore long-term installation and maintenance needs. This adds complexity to both the practice of digital plumbing and to the work of design that supports it. In this paper we study a commercial company producing and installing IoT alarm systems. We examine video recordings that capture how a digital plumbing representative and software development team members make changes to both the installation process and supporting technology. Our data enables us to critically reflect on concepts of infrastructuring, and uncover the ways in which the team methodically foreground hidden elements of the infrastructure to address a point of failure experienced during field trials of a new version of their product. The contributions from this paper are twofold. Firstly, our findings build on previous examples of infrastructuring in practice by demonstrating the use of notions of elemental states to support design reasoning through the continual foregrounding and assessment of tensions identified as key factors at the point of failure. Secondly, we build on current notions of digital plumbing work. We argue that additional responsibilities of 'reporting failure' and 'facilitation of change' are part of the professional digital plumbing role and that commercial teams should support these additional responsibilities through collaborative troubleshooting and design sessions alongside solid communication channels with related stakeholders within the product team.

Human Factors play a significant role in the development and integration of avionic systems to ensure that they are trusted and can be used effectively. As Unoccupied Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology becomes increasingly important to the aviation domain this holds true. This study aims to gain an understanding of UAV operators’ trust requirements when piloting UAVs by utilising a popular aviation interview methodology (Schema World Action Research Method), in combination with key questions on trust identified from the literature. Interviews were conducted with six UAV operators, with a range of experience. This identified the importance of past experience to trust and the expectations that operators hold. Recommendations are made that target training to inform experience, in addition to the equipment, procedures and organisational standards that can aid in developing trustworthy systems. The methodology that was developed shows promise for capturing trust within human-automation interactions.

Mobile Robotic Telepresence (MRP) systems are remotely controlled, mobile videoconferencing devices that allow the remote user to move independently and have a physical presence in the environment. This paper presents a longitudinal study of MRP use in the home, where the first author used an MRP to connect with family, her partner, and friends over a six-month period. Taking an ethnomethodological approach, we present video recorded fragments to explore the phenomenon of ‘visiting’ where MRP users drop into the home for a period of time. We unpack the more ‘procedural’ elements—arriving and departing—alongside ways of ‘dwelling’ together during a visit, and the qualities of mobility, autonomous presence and spontaneity that emerge.

Technology “demos” have become a staple in technology design practice, especially for showcasing prototypes or systems. However, demonstrations are also commonplace and multifaceted phenomena in everyday life, and thus have found their way into empirical research of technology use. In spite of their presence in HCI, their methodical character as a research tool has so far received little attention in our community. We analysed 102 video-recorded demonstrations performed by visually impaired people, captured in the context of a larger ethnographic study investigating their technology use. In doing so, we exhibit core features of demonstrational work and discuss the relevance of the meta-activities occurring around and within demonstrations. We reflect on their value as an approach to doing HCI research on assistive technologies (AT), for enabling shared understanding and letting us identify opportunities for design. Lastly, we discuss their implications as a research instrument for accessibility and HCI research more broadly.

Access to healthcare advice is crucial to promote healthy societies. Many factors shape how access might be constrained, such as economic status, education or, as the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, remote consultations with health practitioners. Our work focuses on providing pre/post-natal advice to maternal women. A salient factor of our work concerns the design and deployment of embodied conversation agents (ECAs) which can sense the (health) literacy of users and adapt to scaffold user engagement in this setting. We present an account of a Wizard of Oz user study of 'ALTCAI', an ECA with three modes of interaction (i.e., adaptive speech and text, adaptive ECA, and non-adaptive ECA). We compare reported engagement with these modes from 44 maternal women who have differing levels of literacy. The study shows that a combination of embodiment and adaptivity scaffolds reported engagement, but matters of health-literacy and language introduce nuanced considerations for the design of ECAs.

Summary In this paper, we present the study of interactional arrangements that support the collaboration of headquarters (HQ), field responders, and a computational planning agent in a time‐critical task setting created by a mixed‐reality game. Interactional arrangements define the extent to which control is distributed between the collaborative parties. We provide 2 field trials, one to study an “on‐the‐loop” arrangement in which HQ monitors and intervenes in agent instructions to field players on demand and the other, to study a version that places HQ more tightly “in‐the‐loop.” The studies provide an understanding of the sociotechnical collaboration between players and the agent in these interactional arrangements by conducting interaction analysis of video recordings and game log data. The first field trial focuses on the collaboration of field responders with the planning agent. Findings highlight how players negotiate the agent guidance within the social interaction of the collocated teams. The second field trial focuses on the collaboration between the automated planning agent and the HQ. We find that the human coordinator and the agent can successfully work together in most cases, with human coordinators inspecting and “correcting” the agent‐proposed plans. Through this field trial‐driven development process, we generalise interaction design implications of automated planning agents around the themes of supporting common ground and mixed‐initiative planning.

UbiComp has been envisioned to bring about a future dominated by calm computing technologies making our everyday lives ever more convenient. Yet the same vision has also attracted criticism for encouraging a solitary and passive lifestyle. The aim of this paper is to explore and elaborate these tensions further by examining the human values surrounding future domestic UbiComp solutions. Drawing on envisioning and contravisioning, we probe members of the public (N=28) through the presentation and focus group discussion of two contrasting animated video scenarios, where one is inspired by 'calm' and the other by 'engaging' visions of future UbiComp technology. By analysing the reasoning of our participants, we identify and elaborate a number of relevant values involved in balancing the two perspectives. In conclusion, we articulate practically applicable takeaways in the form of a set of key design questions and challenges.

More than a billion people in the world live with some form of visual impairment, and a wide variety of technologies are now routinely used by them in the course of 'getting on' in everyday life. However, little is known about the ways in which assistive and non-assistive technologies are brought to bear on material practices. We present findings from a four-month ethnographic study facilitated by a local branch of a UK charity that supports people with visual impairments. Our study explores mainstream and assistive technology use within their everyday lives. We identify three main sites for technology use: social relations and communication practices, textual reading practices, and mobility practices. Via an ethnographic approach we contribute to understanding how people accomplish such practices, and in doing so, uncover the practical competencies that enable people with visual impairments to conduct their everyday activities. Thus we investigate how disability can be thought of in terms of competencies, arguing that understanding of competencies can enrich the design of technologies that fit the needs of people with visual impairments.

Via audiovisual communications and a controllable physical embodiment, Mobile Robotic telePresence (MRP) systems aim to support enhanced collaboration between remote and local members of a given setting. But MRP systems also put the remote user in positions where they frequently rely on the help of local partners. Getting or 'recruiting' such help can be done with various verbal and embodied actions ranging in explicitness. In this paper, we look at how such recruitment occurs in video data drawn from an experiment where pairs of participants (one local, one remote) performed a timed searching task. We find a prevalence of implicit recruitment methods and outline obstacles to effective recruitment that emerge due to communicative asymmetries that are built into MRP design. In a future where remote work becomes widespread, assistance through remote work technology like MRPs needs close examination at a fundamental interactional level, taking into account how communicative asymmetries are at play in everyday use of such technologies.

The Wizard of Oz method is an increasingly common practice in HCI and CSCW studies as part of iterative design processes for interactive systems. Instead of designing a fully-fledged system, the 'technical work' of key system components is completed by human operators yet presented to study participants as if computed by a machine. However, little is known about how Wizard of Oz studies are interactionally and collaboratively achieved in situ by researchers and participants. By adopting an ethnomethodological perspective, we analyse our use of the method in studies with a voice-controlled vacuum robot and two researchers present. We present data that reveals how such studies are organised and presented to participants and unpack the coordinated orchestration work that unfolds 'behind the scenes' to complete the study. We examine how the researchers attend to participant requests and technical breakdowns, and discuss the performative, collaborative, and methodological nature of their work. We conclude by offering insights from our application of the approach to others in the HCI and CSCW communities for using the method.

Abstract This paper presents findings from the deployment of a technology probe—the connected shower—and implications for the development of ‘living services’ or autonomous context-aware consumer-oriented IoT services that exploit sensing to gain consumer ‘insight’ and drive personalised service innovation. It contributes to the literature on water sustainability and the potential role and barriers to the adoption of smart showers in domestic life. It also contributes to our understanding of context, which enables user activity to be discriminated and elaborated thereby furnishing the ‘insight’ living services require for their successful operation. Problematically, however, our study shows that context is not a property of sensor data. Rather than provide contextual insights into showering, the sensor data requires contextualisation to discriminate and elaborate user activity. Thus, in addition to examining the potential of the connected shower in everyday life, we consider how sensor data is contextualised through the doing of data work and the relevance of its interactional accomplishment and organisation to the design of living services.

Predictions of people's behaviour increasingly drive interactions with a new generation of IoT services designed to support everyday life in the home, from shopping to heating. Based on the premise that such automation is difficult due to the contingent nature of people's practices, in this work we explore the nature of these contingencies in depth. We have designed and conducted a technology probe that made use of simple linear predictions as a provocation, and invited people to track the life of their household essentials over a two-month period. Through a mixed-method approach we demonstrate the challenges of simple predictions, and in turn identify eight categories of contingencies that influenced prediction accuracy. We discuss strategies for how designers of future predictive IoT systems may take the contingencies into account by removing, hiding, revealing, managing, or exploiting the system uncertainty at the core of the issue.

The domestic environment is a key area for the design and deployment of autonomous systems. Yet research indicates their adoption is already being hampered by a variety of critical issues including trust, privacy and security. This paper explores how potential users relate to the concept of autonomous systems in the home and elaborates further points of friction. It makes two contributions. The first one is of a methodological nature and focuses on the use of provocative utopian and dystopian scenarios of future autonomous systems in the home. These are used to drive an innovative workshop-based approach to breaching experiments, which surfaces the usually tacit and unspoken background expectancies implicated in the organisation of everyday life that have a powerful impact on the acceptability of future and emerging technologies. The other contribution is substantive, produced through participants’ efforts to repair the incongruity or “reality disjuncture” created by utopian and dystopian visions, and highlights the need to build social as well as computational accountability into autonomous systems, and to enable coordination and control.

Voice User Interfaces (VUIs) are becoming ubiquitously available, being embedded both into everyday mobility via smartphones, and into the life of the home via 'assistant' devices. Yet, exactly how users of such devices practically thread that use into their everyday social interactions remains underexplored. By collecting and studying audio data from month-long deployments of the Amazon Echo in participants' homes-informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis-our study documents the methodical practices of VUI users, and how that use is accomplished in the complex social life of the home. Data we present shows how the device is made accountable to and embedded into conversational settings like family dinners where various simultaneous activities are being achieved. We discuss how the VUI is finely coordinated with the sequential organisation of talk. Finally, we locate implications for the accountability of VUI interaction, request and response design, and raise conceptual challenges to the notion of designing 'conversational' interfaces.

The Internet of Things (IoT) promises to enable applications that foster a more efficient, sustainable, and healthy way of life. If end-users are to take full advantage of these developments we foresee the need for future IoT systems and services to include an element of autonomy and support the delegation of agency to software processes and connected devices. To inform the design of such future technology, we report on a breaching experiment designed to investigate how people integrate an unpredictable service, through the veg box scheme, in everyday life. Findings from our semi-structured interviews and a two-week diary study with 11 households reveal that agency delegation must be warranted, that it must be possible to incorporate delegated decisions into everyday activities, and that delegation is subject to constraint. We further discuss design implications on the need to support people's diverse values, and their coordinative and creative practices.

This paper examines ‘the routine shop’ as part of a project that is exploring automation and autonomy in the Internet of Things. In particular we explicate the ‘work’ involved in anticipating need using an ethnomethodological analysis that makes visible the mundane, ‘seen but unnoticed’ methodologies that household members accountably employ to organise list construction and accomplish calculation on the shop floor. We discuss and reflect on the challenges members’ methodologies pose for proactive systems that seek to support domestic grocery shopping, including the challenges of sensing, learning and predicting, and gearing autonomous agents into social practice within the home.

Provenance network analytics is a novel data analytics approach that helps infer properties of data, such as quality or importance, from their provenance. Instead of analysing application data, which are typically domain-dependent, it analyses the data’s provenance as represented using the World Wide Web Consortium’s domain-agnostic PROV data model. Specifically, the approach proposes a number of network metrics for provenance data and applies established machine learning techniques over such metrics to build predictive models for some key properties of data. Applying this method to the provenance of real-world data from three different applications, we show that it can successfully identify the owners of provenance documents, assess the quality of crowdsourced data, and identify instructions from chat messages in an alternate-reality game with high levels of accuracy. By so doing, we demonstrate the different ways the proposed provenance network metrics can be used in analysing data, providing the foundation for provenance-based data analytics.

Despite the rise of social media and online communication, face-to-face interaction retains its prominence in human life. Being face to face with others is “the most human thing that we do” (Turkle...

In this paper we unpack the use of conversational agents, or so-called intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), in multi-party conversation amongst a group of friends while they are socialising in a café. IPAs such as Siri or Google Now can be found on a large proportion of personal smartphones and tablets, and are promoted as 'natural language' interfaces. The question we pursue here is how they are actually drawn upon in conversational practice? In our work we examine the use of these IPAs in a mundane and common-place setting and employ an ethnomethodological perspective to draw out the character of the IPA-use in conversation. Additionally, we highlight a number of nuanced practicalities of their use in multi-party settings. By providing a depiction of the nature and methodical practice of their use, we are able to contribute our findings to the design of IPAs.

We present fieldwork findings from the deployment of an interactive sensing system that supports the work of energy advisors who give face-to-face advice to low-income households in the UK. We focus on how the system and the data it produced are articulated in the interactions between professional energy advisors and their clients, and how they collaboratively anticipate, rehearse, and perform data work. In addition to documenting how the system was appropriated in advisory work, we elaborate the 'overhead cost' of building collaborative action into connected devices and sensing systems, and the commensurate need to support discrete workflows and accountability systems to enable the methodical incorporation of the IoT into collaborative action. We contribute an elaboration of the social, collaborative methods of data work relevant to those who seek to design and study collaborative IoT systems.

This paper presents findings from a co-design project that aims to augment the practices of professional energy advisors with environmental data from sensors deployed in clients' homes. Premised on prior ethnographic observations we prototyped a sensor platform to support the work of tailoring advice-giving to particular homes. We report on the deployment process and the findings to emerge, particularly the work involved in making sense of or accounting for the data in the course of advice-giving. Our ethnomethodological analysis focuses on the ways in which data is drawn upon as a resource in the home visit, and how understanding and advice-giving turns upon unpacking the indexical relationship of the data to the situated goings-on in the home. This insight, coupled with further design workshops with the advisors, shaped requirements for an interactive system that makes the sensor data available for visual inspection and annotation to support the situated sense-making that is key to giving energy advice.

We present the findings from a study of how people interleave mobile phone use with conversation in pubs. Our findings, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, unpack the interactional methods through which groups of people in pubs occasioned, sustained, and disengaged from mobile device use during conversation with friends. Fundamentally, the work that is done consists of various methods of accounting for mobile device use, and displaying involvement in social interaction while the device is used. We highlight multiple examples of the nuanced ways in which interleaving is problematic in interaction, and relate our findings to the CSCW and HCI literature on collocated interaction. We conclude by considering avenues for future research, and discuss how we may support or disrupt interleaving practices through design to overcome the highlighted interactional troubles.

Smart systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and consequently transforming our lives. The level of system autonomy plays a vital role in the development of smart systems as it profoundly affects how people and these systems interact with each other. However, to date, there are very few studies on human interaction with such systems. This paper presents findings from two field studies where two different prototypes for automating energy tariff-switching were developed and evaluated in the wild. Both prototypes offer flexible autonomy by which users can shift the system's level of autonomy among three options: suggestion-only, semi-autonomy, and full autonomy, whenever they like. Our findings based on thematic analysis show that flexible autonomy is a promising way to sustain users' engagement with smart systems, despite their occasional mistakes. The findings also suggest that users take responsibility for the undesired outcomes of automated actions when delegation of autonomy can be adjusted flexibly.

Command and control environments ranging from transport control rooms to disaster response have long been of interest to HCI and CSCW as rich sites of interactive technology use embedded in work practice. Drawing on our engagement with disaster response teams, including ethnography of their training work, we unpack the ways in which situational uncertainty is managed while a shared operational 'picture' is constituted through various practices around tabletop work. Our analysis reveals how this picture is collaboratively assembled as a socially shared object and displayed by drawing on digital and physical resources. Accordingly, we provide a range of principles implicated by our study that guide the design of systems augmenting and enriching disaster response work practices. In turn, we propose the Augmented Bird Table to illustrate how our principles can be implemented to support tabletop work.

Many of our everyday social interactions involve mobile devices. Yet, these tend to only provide good support for distributed social interactions. Although much HCI and CSCW research has explored how we might support collocated, face-to-face situations using mobile devices, much of this work exists as isolated exemplars of technical systems or interaction designs. This paper draws on a range of such exemplars to develop a practical design framework intended for guiding the design of new mobile experiences for collocated interaction as well as analysing existing ones. Our framework provides four relational perspectives for designing the complex interplay between: the social situation in which it takes place; the technology used and the mechanics inscribed; the physical environment; and the temporal elements of design. Moreover, each perspective features some core properties, which are highly relevant when designing these systems. As part of presenting the framework we also explain the process of its construction along with practical advice on how to read and apply it.

Future energy systems that rely on renewable energy may bring about a radical shift in how we use energy in our homes. We developed and prototyped a future scenario with highly variable, real-time electricity prices due to a grid that mainly relies on renewables. We designed and deployed an agent-based interactive system that enables users to effectively operate the washing machine in this scenario. The system is used to book timeslots of washing machine use so that the agent can help to minimize the cost of a wash by charging a battery at times when electricity is cheap. We carried out a deployment in 10 households in order to uncover the socio-technical challenges around integrating new technologies into everyday routines. The findings reveal tensions that arise when deploying a rationalistic system to manage contingently and socially organized domestic practices. We discuss the trade-offs between utility and convenience inherent in smart grid applications; and illustrate how certain design choices position applications along this spectrum.

We present an ethnographic study of energy advisors working for a charity that provides support, particularly to people in fuel poverty. Our fieldwork comprises detailed observations that reveal the collaborative, interactional work of energy advisors and clients during home visits, supplemented with interviews and a participatory design workshop with advisors. We identify opportunities for Ubicomp technologies that focus on supporting the work of the advisor, including complementing the collaborative advice giving in home visits, providing help remotely, and producing evidence in support of accounts of practices and building conditions useful for interactions with landlords, authorities and other third parties. We highlight six specific design challenges that relate the domestic fuel poverty setting to the wider Ubicomp literature. Our work echoes a shift in attention from energy use and the individual consumer, specifically to matters of advice work practices and the domestic fuel poverty setting, and to the discourse around inclusive Ubicomp technologies.

Energy systems researchers are proposing a broad range of future "smart" energy infrastructures to promote more efficient management of energy resources. This paper considers how consumers might relate to these future smart grids within the UK. To address this challenge we exploited a combination of demonstration and animated sketches to convey the nature of a future smart energy infrastructure based on software agents. Users' reactions suggested that although they felt an obligation to engage with energy issues, they were principally disinterested. Users showed a considerable lack of trust in energy companies raising a dilemma of design. While users might welcome agents to help in engaging with complex energy infrastructures, they had little faith in those that might provide them. This suggests the need to consider how to design software agents to enhance trust in these socio-economic settings.

We present a system and study of personalized energy-related recommendation. AgentSwitch utilizes electricity usage data collected from users' households over a period of time to realize a range of smart energy-related recommendations on energy tariffs, load detection and usage shifting. The web service is driven by a third party real-time energy tariff API (uSwitch), an energy data store, a set of algorithms for usage prediction, and appliance-level load disaggregation. We present the system design and user evaluation consisting of interviews and interface walkthroughs. We recruited participants from a previous study during which three months of their household's energy use was recorded to evaluate personalized recommendations in AgentSwitch. Our contributions are a) a systems architecture for personalized energy services; and b) findings from the evaluation that reveal challenges in designing energy-related recommender systems. In response to the challenges we formulate design recommendations to mitigate barriers to switching tariffs, to incentivize load shifting, and to automate energy management.

The assumed role of humans as controllers and instructors of machines is changing. As systems become more complex and incomprehensible to humans, it will be increasingly necessary for us to place confidence in intelligent interfaces and follow their instructions and recommendations. This type of relationship becomes particularly intricate when we consider significant numbers of humans and agents working together in collectives. While instruction-based interfaces and agents already exist, our understanding of them within the field of Human-Computer Interaction is still limited.

Automics is a photo-souvenir service which utilises mobile devices to support the capture, sharing and annotation of digital images amongst groups of visitors to theme parks. The prototype service mixes individual and group photo-capture with existing in-park, on-ride photo services, to allow users to create printed photo-stories. Herein we discuss initial fieldwork in theme parks that grounded the design of Automics, our development of the service prototype, and its real-world evaluation with theme park visitors. We relate our findings on user experience of the service to a literature on mobile photoware, finding implications for the design of souvenir services.

We investigate whether opportune moments to deliver notifications surface at the endings of episodes of mobile interaction (making voice calls or receiving SMS) based on the assumption that the endings collocate with naturally occurring breakpoint in the user's primary task. Testing this with a naturalistic experiment we find that interruptions (notifications) are attended to and dealt with significantly more quickly after a user has finished an episode of mobile interaction compared to a random baseline condition, supporting the potential utility of this notification strategy. We also find that the workload and situational appropriateness of the secondary interruption task significantly affect subsequent delay and completion rate of the tasks. In situ self-reports and interviews reveal complexities in the subjective experience of the interruption, which suggest that a more nuanced classification of the particular call or SMS and its relationship to the primary task(s) would be desirable.

In this paper we investigate effects of the content of interruptions and of the time of interruption delivery on mobile phones. We review related work and report on a naturalistic quasi-experiment using experience-sampling that showed that the receptivity to an interruption is influenced by its content rather than by its time of delivery in the employed modality of delivery - SMS. We also examined the underlying variables that increase the perceived quality of content and found that the factors interest, entertainment, relevance and actionability influence people's receptivity significantly. Our findings inform system design that seeks to provide context-sensitive information or to predict interruptibility and suggest the consideration of receptivity as an extension to the way we think and reason about interruptibility.

We investigate the prediction of player engagement to address temporal issues arising from the long-term character of pervasive experiences such as interruptibility, mutual player state awareness, disengagement and synchronization on re-engagement. We introduce a model that operationalizes engagement in terms of the elapsed and response time in game messages. We designed and conducted an experiment based on the experience-sampling method to evaluate our model on the basis of a long-term SMS-based game called Day of the Figurines. Statistical analysis supports the hypothesis that player engagement can be predicted by the continuous data properties elapsed time and response time. Our findings point towards further research towards the adaptation of pervasive experiences to the player's temporal context.