Religion and spirituality (R/S) shape billions of lives, yet they remain marginal in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research. Prior literature reviews mapped fragments of this space but missed key contributions and the lived realities of its researchers. We extend this picture through a review of 206 ACM and IEEE publications and a survey of R/S scholars in HCI (n = 19). Our analysis shows a field in transition: Research on R/S is growing slightly in volume and diversity, with design-oriented work emerging as the dominant form of engagement. Yet the ACM and IEEE corpora remain largely separate, reflecting distinct epistemic traditions. Researchers report persistent challenges, including marginalization, exposing a deeper tension in HCI: While HCI claims to center the full range of human experience, R/S experience is still treated with suspicion. Our findings call for a reconsideration: If HCI is serious about human experience, it must take R/S experiences seriously as well.

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence have sparked discussions on how clinical decision-making can be supported. New clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) have been developed and evaluated through workshops and interviews. However, limited research exists on how CDSSs affect decision-making as it unfolds, particularly in settings such as acute care, where decisions are made collaboratively under time pressure and uncertainty. Using a mixed-method study, we explored the impact of a CDSS on decision-making in anesthetic teams during simulated operating room crises. Fourteen anesthetic teams participated in high-fidelity simulations, half using a CDSS prototype for comparative analysis. Qualitative findings from conversation analysis and quantitative results on decision-making efficiency and workload revealed that the CDSS changed team structure, communication, and diagnostic processes. It homogenized decision-making, empowered nursing staff, and introduced friction between analytical and intuitive thinking. We discuss whether these changes are beneficial or detrimental and offer insights to guide future CDSS design.

We present 'Resound', a Research through Design inquiry into alternative techno-spiritual practices of a UK Buddhist community, informed by a first-person and participatory approach with the members. In this pictorial we portray a moment of reflection as we consolidate our design work towards deployment with the community. We introduce the Resound Sphere, a materialisation of our learning and speculations to date, designed as a research product to empirically explore alternatives for how tangible interaction could mediate religious/spiritual practices. We contribute with the framing of a design space, the presentation of our design approach and artefact response to this design space.

Tangible artifacts and embodied experiences are central to religious and spiritual (R/S) practices, and many HCI researchers and interaction designers highlight the importance of materiality and physicality in design. In this review paper, we bring these perspectives together and examine 44 examples of R/S tangible interactive artifacts (TIAs) from academia, art, industry, and R/S communities to understand their specifics and guide future HCI research and design. We analyze these artifacts and map out a design space for R/S TIAs by matching identified characteristics of R/S TIAs with a framework from the study of material religion. The descriptive and generative R/S TIA Design Space covers insights into bodies, things, places, practices, and backgrounds. This paper offers a novel contribution to HCI research on the value and importance of tangibility and embodiment in technology-mediated practices in R/S contexts and serves as a source for future R/S TIA creation and research.

Local civic participation is essential to democracy. Yet, citizens need to be informed about local matters to get involved. Becoming and staying informed about developments in one’s neighbourhood is difficult as local knowledge is scattered among online and offline sources, hard to find and understand. Using participatory Contextual Design we curated a novel form of participation with the interactive artifact "hubbel", which combines the digital and the analogue through a hybrid letterbox to crowd-source local knowledge. During our two-month in-the-wild evaluation, the hubbel was heavily used (260 postcards, 2067 visits). It stimulated democratic discourse and (offline) political participation by rendering tacit local issues visible. We propose ways to improve the hubbel’s design so that citizens can more easily share their expertise with others and to avoid harmful consequences like pseudo-participation. Finally, the hubbel demonstrates why analogue components are indispensable for civic participation tools. Supplements and open-source code: OSF-Link.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the development of alternative formats for religious rituals, such as Protestant online worship services. However, current design approaches focus on problem-solving, and the resulting online solutions merely imitate the offline status quo. To overcome these limitations, we suggest adopting a provotype approach that allows for a more holistic, open-ended dialogue with those affected. We iteratively developed a first provotype in response to tensions found in observation-based field research, aiming to test whether and how it can trigger productive impulses for exploring future technology-mediated worship services based on existing experiences and perspectives. The resulting God-I-Box exaggerates individuality and allows congregants to act almost like liturgists. An analysis of congregants’ and pastors’ (online) first encounters with the God-I-Box revealed three reaction modes: spontaneous emotions, reflective coping, and exploratory imagination. We conclude with reflections and recommendations for provocative research and design in this context and beyond.

This paper presents an inspirational concept for companion technology design, uncontrollability, and a corresponding artefact, the Blessing Companion. Both originated from a research through design project exploring companion technologies for blessing rituals. We established an exchange with Protestant theologians, explored believers’ experiences of blessings, co-speculated on potential technologies, and refined the resulting ideas through ideation, prototyping, and testing. Inspired by believers’ descriptions of blessing experiences as not plannable, predictable, controllable, or enforceable, we adopted the concept of uncontrollability, explored how it might be implemented in companion technologies, and designed the Blessing Companion. The Blessing Companion embodies uncontrollability through its ambiguous appearance and (partly) uncontrollable behaviour. It thus stands in contrast to the prevailing on-demand and user-driven interaction paradigms. We discuss how uncontrollability can be reflected in content, form, and interaction, highlight respective possibilities for companion technologies, and reflect on the Blessing Companion as an example of designing for religious rituals.

Abstract Life transitions, such as the transition from childhood to adulthood, are often accompanied by meaning-making actions such as rituals. Rituals increasingly involve the use of interactive technology. While previous research has focused on specific contexts or technologies, a bird’s eye view of the many appropriation styles during life transitions is missing. To identify the range of technology’s appropriations, we analysed stories from 84 participants and compared these across different life transitions and technologies. We identified three roles interactive technology can play during life transitions: the role of (i) a facilitator easing the accomplishment of tasks within life transitions, (ii) an enabler creating opportunities for new transition rituals and (iii) a social actor that itself is the trigger or the content of transition rituals. We propose the three roles as a classification scheme to structure existing and future research and reflect on the design challenges and evaluation approaches.

Despite many advances, clinical decision support tools (DSTs) often suffer from implementation and acceptance problems in the actual clinical context. We suggest that considering psychological needs-based and embodied user experience theories in the design of DSTs could help to overcome these problems. To examine this idea, we iteratively developed a DST called Cassandra supporting anesthetic teams in crisis management, specifically focusing on psychological needs and fluent interaction with the social and physical environment. We preliminarily evaluated Cassandra in a medical simulation, requiring anesthetic teams to handle a crisis. Although not all features of Cassandra had the intended effect, the results indicated that interacting with Cassandra supported the fulfillment of the identified needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness and was seamlessly integrated into existing diagnostic processes. Considering user experience theories for the design of DSTs seems a promising way to overcome implementation and acceptance problems and eventually improve patient safety.

Multimodal Interfaces (MMIs) have been considered to provide promising interaction paradigms for Virtual Reality (VR) for some time. However, they are still far less common than unimodal interfaces (UMIs). This paper presents a summative user study comparing an MMI to a typical UMI for a design task in VR. We developed an application targeting creative 3D object manipulations, i.e., creating 3D objects and modifying typical object properties such as color or size. The associated open user task is based on the Torrence Tests of Creative Thinking. We compared a synergistic multimodal interface using speech-accompanied pointing/grabbing gestures with a more typical unimodal interface using a hierarchical radial menu to trigger actions on selected objects. Independent judges rated the creativity of the resulting products using the Consensual Assessment Technique. Additionally, we measured the creativity-promoting factors flow, usability, and presence. Our results show that the MMI performs on par with the UMI in all measurements despite its limited flexibility and reliability. These promising results demonstrate the technological maturity of MMIs and their potential to extend traditional interaction techniques in VR efficiently.

Rituals are ubiquitous but not commonplace, help people to make sense of their life, and cultivate personal or social meaning. Although secularization and digitalization impact the occurrence of formal rituals, the need for marking life's transitions remains unchanged. New rituals emerge, such as marking relationship status by hanging love locks on bridges. Tangible technologies hold great potential for augmenting, changing, or enhancing ritual practices which often involve enactments and symbolic props. In this paper, we analyze individual stories of hanging love locks and derive six pointers for designing technology-mediated relationship transition rituals. We applied the pointers in the design of El Corazón, a tangible artifact for relationship transition rituals. The results of an evaluation with 20 sweethearts show that relationship rituals can be designed deliberately, that tangibles can shape ritual experiences and that technology-mediated rituals can provide people with new means of coping with relationship uncertainty.

Virtual Reality (VR) has always been considered a promising medium to support designers with alternative work environments. Still, graphical user interfaces are prone to induce attention shifts between the user interface and the manipulated target objects which hampers the creative process. This work proposes a speech-and-gesture-based interaction paradigm for creative tasks in VR. We developed a multimodal toolbox (MTB) for VR-based design applications and compared it to a typical unimodal menu-based toolbox (UTB). The comparison uses a design-oriented use-case and measures flow, usability, and presence as relevant characteristics for a VR-based design process. The multimodal approach (1) led to a lower perceived task duration and a higher reported feeling of flow. It (2) provided a higher intuitive use and a lower mental workload while not being slower than an UTB. Finally, it (3) generated a higher feeling of presence. Overall, our results confirm significant advantages of the proposed multimodal interaction paradigm and the developed MTB for important characteristics of design processes in VR.