Connected homes and smart assistants shape the future practices of humans, but they do not yet perfectly fit their needs and processes. Our research explores how smart assistants can effectively support users during cooking. First, we completed an observational study with ten participants to understand their needs for competence and autonomy in relation to their individual cooking. Following the empirical results, we prototyped a multimodal assistant that interactively provides stepwise guidance for a multi-part recipe. We evaluated the prototype in a Wizard-of-Oz approach with ten participants. The classification according to cooking competence and need for autonomy turned out to be an efficient way to understand the different user perspectives on the prototype. We could observe under which conditions users prefer graphical or voice interaction and how proactivity of the assistant affects human agency and derived general insights for the design and co-performance of smart assistants in other domains.

There has been a growing interest in taste research in the HCI and CSCW communities. However, the focus is more on stimulating the senses, while the socio-cultural aspects have received less attention. However, individual taste perception is mediated through social interaction and collective negotiation and is not only dependent on physical stimulation. Therefore, we study the digital mediation of taste by drawing on ethnographic research of four online wine tastings and one self-organized event. Hence, we investigated the materials, associated meanings, competences, procedures, and engagements that shaped the performative character of tasting practices. We illustrate how the tastings are built around the taste-making process and how online contexts differ in providing a more diverse and distributed environment. We then explore the implications of our findings for the further mediation of taste as a social and democratized phenomenon through online interaction.

Abstract Although Voice Assistants are ubiquitously available for some years now, the interaction is still monotonous and utilitarian. Sound design offers conceptual and methodological research to design auditive interfaces. Our work aims to complement and supplement voice interaction withsonic overlaysto enrich the user experience. Therefore, we followed a user-centered design process to develop a sound library for weather forecasts based on empirical results from a user survey of associative mapping. After analyzing the data, we created audio clips for seven weather conditions and evaluated the perceived combination of sound and speech with 15 participants in an interview study. Our findings show that supplementing speech with soundscapes is a promising concept that communicates information and induces emotions with a positive affect for the user experience of Voice Assistants. Besides a novel design approach and a collection of sound overlays, we provide four design implications to support voice interaction designers.

Abstract Despite various attempts to prevent food waste and motivate conscious food handling, household members find it difficult to correctly assess the edibility of food. With the rise of ambient voice assistants, we did a design case study to support households’ in situ decision-making process in collaboration with our voice agent prototype, Fischer Fritz. Therefore, we conducted 15 contextual inquiries to understand food practices at home. Furthermore, we interviewed six fish experts to inform the design of our voice agent on how to guide consumers and teach food literacy. Finally, we created a prototype and discussed with 15 consumers its impact and capability to convey embodied knowledge to the human that is engaged as sensor. Our design research goes beyond current Human-Food Interaction automation approaches by emphasizing the human-food relationship in technology design and demonstrating future complementary human-agent collaboration with the aim to increase humans’ competence to sense, think, and act.

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPA) are advertised as reliable companions in the everyday life to simplify household tasks. Due to speech-based usability issues, users struggle to deeply engage with current systems. The capabilities of newer generations of standalone devices are even extended by a display, also to address some weaknesses like memorizing auditive information. So far, it is unclear how the potential of a multimodal experience is realized by designers and appropriated by users. Therefore, we observed 20 participants in a controlled setting, planning a dinner with the help of an audio-visual-based IPA, namely Alexa Echo Show. Our study reveals ambiguous mental models of perceived and experienced device capabilities, leading to confusion. Meanwhile, the additional visual output channel could not counterbalance the weaknesses of voice interaction. Finally, we aim to illustrate users’ conceptual understandings of IPAs and provide implications to rethink audiovisual output for voice-first standalone devices.

Critical consumerism is complex as ethical values are difficult to negotiate, appropriate products are hard to find, and product information is overwhelming. Although recommender systems offer solutions to reduce such complexity, current designs are not appropriate for niche practices and use non-personalized intransparent ethics. To support critical consumption, we conducted a design case study on a personalized food recommender system. Therefore, we first conducted an empirical pre-study with 24 consumers to understand value negotiations and current practices, co-designed the recommender system, and finally evaluated it in a real-world trial with ten consumers. Our findings show how recommender systems can support the negotiation of ethical values within the context of consumption practices, reduce the complexity of finding products and stores, and strengthen consumers. In addition to providing implications for the design to support critical consumption practices, we critically reflect on the scope of such recommender systems and its appropriation.

Frequently the main purpose of domestic artifacts equipped with smart sensors is to hide technology, like previous examples of a Smart Mirror show. However, current Smart Homes often fail to provide meaningful IoT applications for all residents’ needs. To design beyond efficiency and productivity, we propose to realize the potential of the traditional artifact for calm and engaging experiences. Therefore, we followed a design case study approach with 22 participants in total. After an initial focus group, we conducted a diary study to examine home routines and developed a conceptual design. The evaluation of our mid-fidelity prototype shows, that we need to study carefully the practices of the residents to leverage the physical material of the artifact to fit the routines. Our Smart Mirror, enhanced by digital qualities, supports meaningful activities and makes the bathroom more appealing. Thereby, we discuss domestic technology design beyond automation.

Recent publications propose concepts of systems that integrate the various services and data sources of everyday food practices. However, this research does not go beyond the conceptualization of such systems. Therefore, there is a deficit in understanding how to combine different services and data sources and which design challenges arise from building integrated Household Information Systems. In this paper, we probed the design of an Integrated Household Information System with 13 participants. The results point towards more personalization, automatization of storage administration and enabling flexible artifact ecologies. Our paper contributes to understanding the design and usage of Integrated Household Information Systems, as a new class of information systems for HCI research.

For over a decade, researchers from the practice-centered computing community are taking social practices as a unit of design. While the first generation focused on a social practice in isolation, more recent work argues for the (inter-)connections of mutually influencing practices as the primary unit of design. We discuss these current approaches to motivate the notion of a network of practices. Utilizing the case of food practices, we construct and analyze a network populated by the answers of 60 participants. Based on this network we suggest how to identify central elements and clusters as well as points for intervention within the overall network, but also within and in-between clusters of practices. Based on this, our work critically discusses how an understanding of practices as a network could improve practice-based research and design.

There is currently uncertainty in the research community as to how ICT can and should be designed in such a way that it can be convincingly integrated into the everyday lives of prison inmates. In this paper, we discuss a design fiction that closes this research gap. The descriptions and results of the study are purely fictitious. Excluded is the State of the Art as well as the description of the legal situation of prisons in Germany. The analysis of the fictional study data designed here thus refers to the real world in order to derive ethical guidelines and draw practical conclusions. It is our intention to use these results as a possible basis for further research. The paper presents results of an explorative study dealing with the design, development and evaluation of an AI-based Smart Mirror System, Prison AI 2.0, in a German prison. Prison AI 2.0 was developed for daily use and voluntarily tested by eight prisoners over a period of 12 months to gain insight into their individual and social impact, with an emphasis on its ability to actively support rehabilitation. Based on qualitative data, our findings suggest that intelligent AI-based devices can actually help promote such an outcome. Our results also confirm the valuable impact of (Psychosocial) ICT on the psychological, social and individual aspects of prison life, and in particular how prisoners used the Smart Mirror system to improve and maintain their cognitive, mental and physical state and to restore social interactions with the outside world. With the presentation of these results we want to initiate discussions about the use of ICT by prisoners in closed prisons in order to identify opportunities and risks.