When a person with dementia asks about a deceased partner’s health, caregivers and relatives are often unsure how to respond. These interactions involving reality disjunction are ethically and emotionally complex, with no universal ‘right’ answer. Reflecting on such interactions may help people better understand and navigate these situations. We explore how chatbots can complement humans in supporting such reflection. We designed three chatbots that support reflection through role-play, dilemmas, or analysis, and used them as probes in focus groups with 14 relatives and 10 caregivers of people with dementia. Findings reveal complementary strengths. Humans provide irreplaceable reflective support grounded in contextual, emotional, experiential, and relational involvement. Chatbots’ lack of human qualities offers unconstrained suggestions, evidence-based feedback, and emotionally distanced dialogue without relational consequences. We offer empirical insights into reflective support needs in dementia care and provide design implications for chatbots that complement rather than mimic human reflection.

NOVIX is an early‑stage extended reality (XR) prototype designed to explore how children understand interactions in non‑visual XR environments. For the initial co‑design phase, we developed the GhostXR activity, where children engage with a playful, invisible ‘ghost’ through movement, touch, proximity, and haptic/auditory cues. The system combines spatial audio, controller-based light and sound, and vibration cues. Our demo showcases a playable XR experience highlighting how children interpret non-visual agents in XR, how they express possible action–reaction loops, and how multisensory feedback supports their meaning‑making.

Children’s self-report is essential for research, education, and healthcare, yet existing methods such as surveys and diaries can be experienced as tedious and so lead to disengagement and low-quality responses. Chatbots have been suggested as a way to support children through conversational interaction, using age-appropriate language and an empathetic tone. Here we explore what could be suitable conversational styles for such chatbots. Specifically, we explore rhyme as a child-centered conversational style. We first conducted a co-design workshop with 35 children, which revealed preferences for short, playful, and soothing conversational patterns. Building on these insights, we designed a voice-based sleep diary in rhyming style and compared it to a prose style in a within-subjects study involving 40 children aged 8-12. Results show that rhyming prompts significantly improved response quality across question types and age groups, while maintaining high engagement even among children who preferred the prose style. We contribute proof-of-concept empirical evidence and design insights demonstrating how phonological scaffolding exemplified through rhyme extends the design space of capability-adapted chatbots beyond semantic simplification alone. While limited to short-term, lab-based sessions, this work provides initial evidence that conversational style can function as a design lever.

Digital sleep diaries are widely used in clinical practice and research to monitor children’s subjective sleep quality. A well-known limitation of survey methods is that children may not provide high-quality responses because they cannot or are not motivated to do so. We examine how to design "live", continuous feedback in voice-based sleep diaries in order to enhance the quality of children’s responses. In a co-design workshop, we explored children’s preferences for different forms of feedback. We designed and compared experimentally symbolic (smiley), numeric, and no-feedback conditions, showing that both feedback types improved response quality across questions. Finally, an eight-day field study revealed that feedback resulted in higher and more consistent quality in self-report over time. Across these three studies, children valued playful and clear feedback, with preferences shifting depending on their cognitive needs. Our findings provide evidence that effective feedback must balance affective engagement and cognitive clarity and adapt to different contexts. We contribute empirically supported design insights for creating child-centered voice-based surveys that aim to enhance children’s adherence in independent self-report surveys. Our recommendations based on the study of sleep diaries can potentially be applied in other areas using voice-based surveys.

Informed consent is essential for ethical research, but applying it in technology research involving people with dementia can be challenging. We conducted interviews with researchers, participants with dementia, and data stewards to explore these challenges and strategies for obtaining consent. Using communication theory, we examined how linear, dynamic, and contextual communication elements influence consent practices. Our findings show that relying too much on one-way information transfer creates problems in conveying information, documenting agreements, monitoring ongoing consent, and improving the consent processes. However, dynamic, context-sensitive strategies, such as paraphrasing information, fostering personal relationships, and designing supportive environments, can turn consent into a collaborative and inclusive process. We offer practical recommendations and reflective questions to improve consent conversations in dementia research and suggest future directions for more dynamic consent materials. By reframing consent as a dynamic and contextual process, we aim to make technology research in sensitive settings more ethical and inclusive.

Sleep diaries are essential self-reporting tools for understanding children’s sleep patterns, but maintaining sustained engagement and high-quality self-reporting remains challenging. While voice input has been explored in child-computer interaction research as a method to improve engagement, limited evidence exists regarding its effectiveness in supporting sustained self-reporting over time. To address this gap, we conducted a five-day field study with 20 children aged seven to twelve, using a multimodal sleep diary that integrated both voice and text input modalities. Our findings reveal that voice input significantly supports younger children in maintaining engagement over five days, though their response quality remains lower than that of older children. Two distinct response quality patterns over time also emphasize the importance of accounting for individual differences in task performance. Furthermore, input modality preferences varied by age: older children consistently favored text input, while younger children generally preferred voice input over time. These results highlight the potential of incorporating voice input into text-based sleep diaries to better accommodate the diverse needs of children, enhancing both sustained engagement and response quality. Future studies with longer observation periods are needed to validate and extend these findings.

Abstract Powered by smartphones and wearable devices, the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) has increased in popularity for studying behaviors, thoughts, and experiences over time and in situ. Participants in ESM studies receive several notifications a day to self-report but often disengage due to intrusive and poorly timed notifications. Consequently, the response rate drops over time, hampering data collection and degrading ecological validity. Researchers have experimented with various strategies to optimize notification scheduling, including personalization, context sensing, and machine learning (ML). Edge computing can facilitate the training of ML models without the need for server communications, which is especially convenient for in-the-wild studies with unreliable network connectivity. Complementary logical evaluations on edge devices can minimize participant burden by accounting for sampling density, i.e., ensuring a minimum number of well-distributed daily notifications. However, these efforts raise engineering and scientific challenges related to avoiding cold start and training models on smartwatches. To overcome these challenges, we propose an open-source architecture and software that facilitates online learning to optimize notification delivery. Our feasibility study with $$N=37$$ N = 37 participants resulted in a response rate of 10.2% higher and a reaction time of 9.6% lower on average compared to the classical interval-based sampling.

Tracking fluid intake can help reduce the risk of dehydration and, subsequently, the rehospitalization of older adults. Several technological solutions have been developed to track fluid intake, but older adults have not widely embraced them. We report on a study using an existing solution, MyBeaker, as a probe to explore the limitations when used in the daily lives of the expected user group. We underscore the insights gathered from the study and address them by suggesting a proof-of-concept redesign aimed at integrating elderly users' current fluid intake practices more seamlessly. We highlight insights gained from the study and demonstrate the potential benefits of using existing technology as probes to better understand the home context of older adults for the purpose of improving existing or informing the design of new assistive technologies.

Users of online health communities have difficulty finding others with similar health experiences. They are often asked to use keywords when searching for their peers, but it is not uncommon for them not to know the right terms. This becomes particularly complex when unsure what or whom they are looking for. Moreover, the richness of patient perspectives is lost in the volume of discussion threads. In this paper, we investigate how to design to facilitate locating peers and learning self-care ideas from them. We created a prototype mimicking a mobile application for an online health community. The application recommended other community members to connect with and suggested self-care ideas based on what they had tried. Following a user-centered qualitative evaluation, we explore what ten people with cardiovascular disease and three clinicians thought of the prototype. Our findings reveal the preponderance of the lifestyle profile in locating peers. In light of this, we argue that, as individuals seek to lead as normal a life as possible, the most helpful suggestions in their quest may come from peers most similar to them in terms of habits and activity level. We translate the research findings into recommendations to inform future design. • Our findings reveal the preponderance of the lifestyle profile in locating peers. • Seeking normalcy, individuals may favor suggestions from peers with similar lifestyles. • Peer recommendations, enabling user control and potentially reducing search efforts, were favored. • Design should attend to the everyday self-care strategies community members can contribute.

The unfolding climate crisis has resulted in a rising interest for increasing sustainability awareness and achieving energy savings worldwide. Several interventions within educational environments have been aimed at mobilizing younger audiences toward such goals. However, most of the interventions carried out so far are based on a subset of possible tools (e.g., IoT monitoring and gamification) and offer “all or nothing” approaches, which do not cope well with the uniqueness of schools and the need to adapt interventions to specific contexts (e.g. school size, building, curriculum, and teacher involvement). We present a large-scale intervention in 25 school buildings in Europe over the course of two school years. Our intervention was based on the installation of a relatively low-cost IoT infrastructure in schools, that produced real-time energy-related data from the school buildings involved, and the application of a strategy combining, in a flexible and customizable way, educational activities, monitoring tools, gamification, and competition to motivate behavior change and achieve energy savings. Overall, 2983 students and 204 educators were directly involved to a variable degree of participation. Our results indicate a positive overall result in terms of short-term energy savings in most schools involved, with an average reduction of 20%–25% in the energy that could be affected by end-users, as well as a 32.9% increase after the intervention in students self-reporting good or very good sustainability awareness. These findings suggest that such interventions can be a valuable step toward educating young students regarding sustainability and toward sustainable schools, if designed and implemented properly.

Research in co-design methods and children’s participation in design has addressed aspects such as adapting design activities to children’s interests and abilities as well as overcoming power imbalance while co-designing with adults. Less attention has been paid towards methods for empathic design with children, which consider children’s emotions in design. Role play, as a co-design method for empathic design, has been studied mostly with adult participants and in a Western cultural context. We conducted four role-play sessions with children in rural India, to explore how they perceive and understand an empathy- and emotions-focused role-play and what lessons, challenges and opportunities can be identified which may inform research in interaction design and children. We observed a strongly ingrained gender and teacher-student hierarchy dynamic, which led to challenges with engagement and potential biases on what children understood and shared with us. We suggest further exploring how co-design methods for empathy, and especially expanding such methodological investigations to diverse cultural contexts.

Cognitive assessment games attempt to improve cognitive assessment’s experience and data quality by implementing game-like features, e.g., points and narratives. However, cognitive games maintain the repetitiveness and restricted control common in traditional cognitive assessment tasks, which thwart players’ sense of control and impair their motivation and experience. Leading to only modest improvements over traditional tasks.

Communication can become challenging for people with dementia due to language, speech, discourse, and memory impairments. Although recent developments in Human-Computer Interaction have addressed some of these communication challenges, little is known about how they affect the self-presentation of people with dementia in everyday interactions. To understand this connection, we conducted interviews with sixteen people with dementia, six spouses, and fourteen formal caregivers. Our qualitative data revealed that people with dementia’s presentation of competence, politeness, engagement, and reality are altered by communication challenges, which can impact their self-esteem, interactions, and relationships. Our study highlights the need for developing technologies that can enhance mutual understanding and acceptance of people with dementia’s evolving presentation of self. Additionally, policy changes are required to reduce the stigma associated with communication challenges to foster social inclusion.

Research has shown the potential of social robots to support learning in science, technology, and language. We contribute to this field by exploring how robots can support music learning. We report on a within-subjects experiment where 50 young learners practiced the piano in the presence of a robot assuming a non-evaluative and a self-assessment enhancing role implemented in a Wizard-of-Oz fashion. We examined whether the robot can make piano practice more fun, and whether initiating self-assessment to support self-regulated learning is a useful strategy for the robot. We collected quantitative self-report data to assess fun, learning, interest, engagement, and effort. We found a direct positive effect of fun on learning in the context of musical instrument practice. Path modeling showed a positive influence of having fun on learners' attitudes, interests, and learning outcomes in music education, particularly with the self- assessment robot role exhibiting superiority.

The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) is commonly used to understand behaviors, thoughts, and feelings in the wild by collecting self-reports. Sustaining sufficient response rates, especially in long-running studies remains challenging. To avoid low response rates and dropouts, experimenters rely on their experience, proposed methodologies from earlier studies, trial and error, or the scarcely available participant behavior data from previous ESM protocols. This approach often fails in finding the acceptable study parameters, resulting in redesigning the protocol and repeating the experiment. Research has shown the potential of machine learning to personalize ESM protocols such that ESM prompts are delivered at opportune moments, leading to higher response rates. The corresponding training process is hindered due to the scarcity of open data in the ESM domain, causing a cold start, which could be mitigated by simulating participant behavior. Such simulations provide training data and insights for the experimenters to update their study design choices. Creating this simulation requires behavioral science, psychology, and programming expertise. Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as facilitators for information inquiry and programming, albeit random and occasionally unreliable. We aspire to assess the readiness of LLMs in an ESM use case. We conducted research using GPT-3.5 turbo-16k to tackle an ESM simulation problem. We explored several prompt design alternatives to generate ESM simulation programs, evaluated the output code in terms of semantics and syntax, and interviewed ESM practitioners. We found that engineering LLM-enabled ESM simulations have the potential to facilitate data generation, but they perpetuate trust and reliability challenges.

Smartwatches are emerging as an increasingly popular platform for longitudinal in situ data collection with methods often referred to as experience sampling and ecological momentary assessment. Their small size challenges designers of relevant applications to ensure usability and a positive user experience. This paper investigates the usability of different input techniques for responding to in situ surveys administered on smartwatches. In this paper, we classify different input techniques that can support this task. Then, we report on two user studies that compared different input techniques and their suitability at two levels of user activity: while sitting and while walking. A pilot study (N = 18) examined numeric input with three input techniques that utilize common features of smartwatches with a touchscreen: Multi-Step Tapping, Bezel Rotation, and Swiping. The main study (N = 80) examined numeric input and list selection including in the comparison two more techniques: Long-List Tapping and Virtual Buttons to scroll through options. Overall, we found that whether users are seated or walking did not affect the speed or accuracy of input. Bezel rotation was the slowest input technique but also the most accurate. Swiping resulted in most errors. Long-List Tapping yielded the shortest reaction times. Future research should examine different form factors for the smartwatch and diverse usage contexts.

Social robots exist in various forms but are still not spreading widely to the societal contexts they are envisioned for, such as educational settings. There appears to be a gap between research and practice: A lot of research already demonstrates promising results for using social robots in various domains, but this promise has yet to be realized in “the real world”. The aim of this paper is to form a systematic understanding of the potential and challenges of social robots in the domain of education and learning, which is an intensively researched application domain for social robots. We conducted a meta-review of recent literature reviews (published in 2018-2022), using the PRISMA method. We analyzed 12 review papers that met the defined inclusion criteria by extracting the potential benefits and challenges presented in these reviews. We identify six benefits, five challenges, and six recommendations for future research on social robots in education and learning. These findings emphasize the potential and developments needed to realize the potential of social robots in educational contexts.

Existing work on social robotic persuasion (SRP) has provided ample knowledge that can benefit the design of social robotics. However, as recent research points out, this knowledge is not presented in a format that effectively supports design practice. Research on translational science provides a theoretical foundation for connecting research to design practice, but the process of knowledge appropriation remains under-explored. In this paper, we present the development and evaluation of the SRPD (social robot persuasive design) cards and the corresponding Roundtable and Spotlight generative methods. Our results show that the SRPD cards can benefit the ideation phase in social robotic design and that our generative methods can optimize participants’ experience in a brainstorming activity.

Social robotic (SR) applications are expected to advance in the near future, which is indicated by the level of autonomy of SR, and is supported by the maturing of key technologies. However, technical, research-practice communication, and ethical challenges remain in the design of such advanced SR applications. In this paper, we start with our research cases through which we encountered and explored the challenges facing the design practice of advanced SR applications. Then we present an overview of recent design research endeavors in the HRI field and our research cases to demonstrate design research’s characteristics, focus, and approaches. Finally, we discuss how the eliciting, speculative, and communicative approaches of design research can support user investigations with the hindrances of technical limitations, communicate between basic & applied research and design practice, and engage in ethical explorations of advanced SR applications.

Many children suffer from sleep problems which can be detrimental to their development and well-being. Treating clinicians rely on sleep diaries to assess how patients experience sleep. Currently used sleep diaries are made for adults and parents are asked to fill them in for their children. Digital sleep diaries for children could provide more reliable reports and enhance children's involvement in their treatment. We report on the design of Snoozy, a chatbot-based sleep diary for children eight to twelve. Following an informant-based design approach, we: 1) interviewed clinicians and parents 2) involved children as co-designers (N=8), user-test participants (N=17) and field-test participants (N=5). Earlier works have examined the potential of chatbots in non-clinical personal informatics for children. Our study demonstrates how children can report on sleep-related experiences to clinicians, through a chatbot that asks clear and guided questions and communicates with kindness and empathy.

The role of fun in learning, and specifically in learning to code, is critical but not yet fully understood. Fun is typically measured by post session questionnaires, which are coarse-grained, evaluating activities that sometimes last an hour, a day or longer. Here we examine how fun impacts learning during a coding activity, combining continuous physiological response data from wristbands and facial expressions from facial camera videos, along with self-reported measures (i.e. knowledge test and reported fun). Data were collected from primary school students (N = 53) in a single-occasion, two-hours long coding workshop, with the BBC micro:bits. We found that a) sadness, anger and stress are negatively, and arousal is positively related to students’ relative learning gain (RLG), b) experienced fun is positively related to students' RLG and c) RLG and fun are related to certain physiological markers derived from the physiological response data.

This paper presents a qualitative study that uses video prototypes and interviews to explore older adults’ acceptance, needs, and design requirements towards a social robotic application for physical rehabilitation. Our study identified the benefits of applying social robots (SR) in physical rehabilitation. Further, we discovered participants’ preference for an anthropomorphic social robot design. The data revealed a desire for social interaction could increase motivation for older adults to engage in an active lifestyle and social robot acceptance. However, participants showed low motivation for technology adoption and negatively anthropomorphize the social robot, which lowers acceptance for their application. This work complements the current user-centered explorations with SR in rehabilitation, and provides considerations for SR design for rehabilitative applications.

In music education, staying motivated has always been a crucial goal, especially for children. Earlier research has demonstrated how social robots could help improve motivation and increase the performance of children practicing music pieces. As important stakeholders, the attitudes and expec- tations of parents and music teachers are important factors that affect children’s and their own acceptance of applying social robots in music education. In this study, a survey was created and used to assess parents’ and music teachers’ attitudes, expectations, and intentions related to using social robots in music education. The survey results suggested that parents and music teachers expect robots to act as assistive and motivating agents, give positive feedback, and schedule and structure practice sessions. Moreover, parents expect a social robot to evaluate student performance, while music teachers focus more on positive encouragement. The biggest concerns of these stakeholders are whether the robots can convey the emotional aspects of music and demonstrate how to play the instrument. The intention of using robots is positively correlated with positive attitudes towards robots in general and the positive attitude towards robots specifically in the context of music education. The current study contributes insights into parents’ and music teachers’ attitudes and expectations as determinants of their acceptance of of social robots in music education, and provides a method for measuring these attitudes and expectations.

Despite a wealth of behavior change theories and techniques available, designers often struggle to apply theory in the design of behavior change technologies. We present the Behavior Change Design (BCD) cards, a design support tool that makes behavioral science theory accessible to interaction designers during design meetings. Grounded on two theoretical frameworks of behavior change, the BCD cards attempt to map 34 behavior change techniques to five stages of behavior change, thus assisting designers in selecting appropriate techniques for given behavioral objectives. We present the design of the BCD cards along with the results of two formative and one summative study that aimed at informing the design of the cards and assessing their impact on the design process.

Background: Where self-report is unfeasible or observations are difficult, physiological estimates of pain are needed. Methods: Pain-data from 30 healthy adults were gathered to create a database of physiological pain responses. A model was then developed, to analyze pain-data and visualize the AI-estimated level of pain on a mobile app. Results: The initial low precision and F1-score of the pain classification algorithm were resolved by interpolating a percentage of similar data. Discussion: This system presents a novel approach to assess pain in noncommunicative people with the use of a sensor sock, AI predictor and mobile app. Performance analysis and the limitations of the AI algorithm are discussed.

Crowd-powered conversational systems (CPCS) are gaining considerable attention for their potential utility in a variety of application domains, for which automated conversational interfaces are still too limited. CPCS currently suffer from long response delays, which hampers their potential as conversational partners. The majority of prior work in this area has focused on demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and improving performance, while evaluation studies have primarily focused on response latency and ways to reduce it. Relatively little is currently known about how response delays in a CPCS can affect user experience. While the importance of reducing response latency is widely recognized in the broader field of human-computer interaction, little attention has been paid to how response quality, response delay, conversational context, and the complexity of the task affect how users experience the conversation, and how they perceive waiting for responses in particular. We conducted a between-subjects experiment (N = 478), to examine the influence of these four factors on the overall waiting experience of users. Results show that users 1) evaluated the waiting experience more negatively when the response delay was longer than 8 seconds, 2) underestimated the elapsed time but experienced more frustration in tasks with high complexity, 3) underestimated the elapsed time and experienced less frustration with high quality bot's utterances, 4) judged response delays to be slightly longer, and experienced more frustration in an emotion-centric CPCS compared to a task-centric CPCS. Our insights can inform the design of future CPCSs with regards to defining performance requirements and anticipating their potential impact on the user experience they can facilitate.

Crowd-Powered Conversational Systems (CPCS) are gaining traction due to their potential utility in a range of application fields where automated conversational interfaces are still inadequate. Currently, long response times negatively impact CPCSs, limiting their potential application as conversational partners. Related research has focused on developing algorithms for swiftly hiring workers and synchronous crowd coordination techniques to ensure high-quality work. Evaluation studies typically concern system reaction times and performance measurements, but have so far not examined the effects of extended wait times on users. The goal of this study, based on time perception models, is to explore how effective different time fillers are at reducing the negative impacts of waiting in CPCSs. To this end, we conducted a rigorous simulation-based between-subjects (N = 930) study on the Prolific crowdsourcing platform to assess the influence of different filler types across three levels of delay (8, 16 & 32s) for Information Retrieval (IR) and stress management tasks. Our results show that asking users to perform secondary tasks (e.g., microtasks or breathing exercises) while waiting for longer periods of time helped divert their attention away from timekeeping, increased their engagement, and resulted in shorter perceived waiting times. For shorter delays, conversational fillers generated more intense immersion and contributed to shorten the perception of time.

Applications which use some form of artificial intelligence (AI) have become embedded in our everyday interactions. Very often, AI-based apps are personalized and modelled on users’ needs and preferences. However, such applications of AI tread a delicate balance between enhancing user experience and jeopardizing personal autonomy. Personal autonomy and sense of agency are crucial for human well-being and development. In this paper, we probe this fine balance aiming to capture users’ lived experiences and perceptions of interacting with AI-based apps. We present insights from a phenomenological study (N=15) regarding users’ perception of personal autonomy when interacting with AI in everyday contexts. We found that these experiences are transitory and largely influenced by contextual factors. Users experience a loss of autonomy when their privacy or identity is threatened or when their expectations are broken. To mitigate such loss of autonomy, mechanisms for providing intelligibility and control of AI are desired.

Abstract In this paper, we examine how experts in digital transformation of healthcare envision the application of digital twins (DTs). The concept of a DT refers to a digital replica of potential and actual physical assets, processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes including scientific experiments, simulations and prediction of intervention outcomes. DTs are an emerging technological vision and while evocative as a term it holds different promises and connotations for different application areas and may evolve in very different directions. To examine how these directions can develop and impact healthcare, we used the Delphi method to reach a consensus among experts on three different research questions we put forward, namely how experts see the materialization, expectations and implementation of a DT in healthcare. We followed up with a survey with open questions to the experts aiming for a deeper consideration on the top ranked topics from the Delphi study.

This issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction features contributions in the intersection of human-computer interaction and software engineering, with further disciplines blending into a rich set of scientific works. 2021 is the first time the annual conference on Engineering Interactive Computing Systems (EICS) is hosted in the Netherlands and in the context of an Industrial Design department. We take this opportunity to focus on the relations and influence of the design discipline on the work of the EICS community. This resulted in a new set of topics for EICS, which were already partly reflected in the many submissions we received in three extensive review rounds throughout 2020 and the beginning of 2021. In this editorial we offer a perspective on what EICS is not yet, looking at the inclusion of and interplay with design as a related discipline.

Design cards are a popular way for designers to encode and communicate design knowledge. Aiming to inform the designers of such design tools we set out to characterize the design space of design cards in a two-pronged approach involving a) a systematic literature survey on the use of design cards and b) card sorting interviews, which were carried out in order to characterize the first impressions of design cards from design students, for different formal qualities and content of design cards. Our results point towards a need to develop more abstract and evocative presentations, that are visually attractive while supporting a flexible application of cards. Future research could explore whether such preferences are consistent with how card sets are used during design processes in practice.

Wearables combine practical and conceptual challenges related to electronics, clothing and interaction design. Research through design in this area is commonly done iteratively through prototypes of increasing levels of fidelity, often relying on manual fabrication. However, manual fabrication presents challenges when comparing prototypes due to their varying levels of realization and the inaccuracy of reproductions. We discuss how using digital machine embroidery, combined with chemical embroidery technique, supports fabricating consistent high-fidelity prototypes for soft wearables in the form of research products. Our approach involves creating the textile substrate together with integrating and embedding electronic components through a unified process whilst keeping high control over alterations between prototypes. We illustrate this approach through the design process of the Smart Sock, a sensorized sock for rehabilitation. We detail the challenges behind our process and reflect on the opportunities emerging from using digital machine and chemical embroidery techniques combined to craft research products.

Supporting students to make their reflections visible and accessible during the inquiry-based process can enhance the learning outcomes and foster reflective thinking. This research examines how technology can play a role in scaffolding students to create contextualized reflection-in-action products which can contribute to reflection-on-action in design-based learning classroom. In this paper, we present the design of a multimedia tool called ReflectionScope, which offers contextualized scaffolding to prompt students to monitor their action and create reflective videos using the digital video-camera or visual “scope” attached. Twenty-one secondary school students (aged 13) used ReflectionScope in a two-weeks design-based learning class. An analysis of the reflective video’s students created during this class and the post-interview, shows that students articulate their reflection-in-action in a structured way with context-rich information. Students perceived that the videos are beneficial for retrieving and understanding the contextual reflection-in-action moments for reflection-on-action. Based on our findings, we propose design principles that can contribute to designing for reflection practices which can be enhanced by media-technology in real-world inquiry-based learning environments.

This Research Full Paper presents a case study where university students (N=13) use a paper diary called EmoForm to self-track their emotions over a ten-week-long design-based learning course. Design-Based Learning (DBL) is a learning approach that enables students to learn through a sequence of design activities in a project-based learning or problem-based learning environment. Student's emotions are known to play an essential role in learning settings. We argue that students engaging in DBL will benefit from self-tracking of emotions. Such self-tracking will enable students to identify and control their emotions during the DBL process. The results of this study confirm that self-tracking with EmoForm enabled students' emotion awareness in DBL. In particular, our results illustrate how self-tracking with EmoForm impacted on students' DBL from three major aspects. We discuss design challenges regarding tools to support emotion awareness in DBL, and we present a summary of strategies conducive towards emotion awareness in DBL and the implications for future research.

On-demand emotional support is an expensive and elusive societal need that is exacerbated in difficult times — as witnessed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior work in affective crowdsourcing has examined ways to overcome technical challenges for providing on-demand emotional support to end users. This can be achieved by training crowd workers to provide thoughtful and engaging on-demand emotional support. Inspired by recent advances in conversational user interface research, we investigate the efficacy of a conversational user interface for training workers to deliver psychological support to users in need. To this end, we conducted a between-subjects experimental study on Prolific, wherein a group of workers (N=200) received training on motivational interviewing via either a conversational interface or a conventional web interface. Our results indicate that training workers in a conversational interface yields both better worker performance and improves their user experience in on-demand stress management tasks.

The application of social robots has recently been explored in various types of educational settings including music learning. Earlier research presented evidence that simply the presence of a robot can influence a person's task performance, confirming social facilitation theory and findings in human-robot interaction. Confirming the evaluation apprehension theory, earlier studies showed that next to a person's presence, also that person's social role could influence a user's performance: the presence of a (non-) evaluative other can influence the user's motivation and performance differently. To be able to investigate that, researchers need the roles for the robot which is missing now. In the current research, we describe the design of two social roles (i.e., evaluative role and non-evaluative role) of a robot that can have different appearances. For this, we used the SocibotMini: A robot with a projected face, allowing diversity and great flexibility of human-like social cue presentation. An empirical study at a real practice room including 20 participants confirmed that users (i.e., children) evaluated the robot roles as intended. Thereby, the current research provided the robot roles allowing to study whether the presence of social robots in certain social roles can stimulate practicing behavior and suggestions of how such roles can be designed and improved. Future studies can investigate how the presence of a social robot in a certain social role can stimulate children to practice.

The IoT industry supplies a plethora of Internet connected devices and services supporting smart home automation. However, end-users having little knowledge of the features and possibilities of such technologies, face difficulties in conjuring up useful application scenarios combining such devices and services, thus missing out on potential applications outside those provided by vendors. A remedy for such end-users can potentially be found in crowdsourcing IoT scenario creation. For such an enterprise to be viable it is essential to assess whether crowdsourcing can result in practical and original scenarios. This article reports two studies aiming to establish the practicality and originality of crowdsourced IoT scenarios for smart homes. In the first study, we recruited 102 crowd workers who created 306 scenarios in various categories. We then recruited a second cohort of 620 crowd workers to rate the scenarios’ creativity. In the second study, we evaluated the corpus of IoT scenarios by 20-experienced smart home users recruited through a screening survey. Our results show that the crowd evaluations of originality and creativity are strongly correlated with those of smart home users. Our major IoT-specific findings in relation to creativity are: a) The number of IoT devices and the number of combination of devices impact how creative the scenarios are perceived; b) Workers with self-reported intermediate programming knowledge wrote more creative scenarios when compared to workers having expert knowledge; c) Computational metrics such as text metrics can provide the basis for automated assessment of the scenarios’ creativity. Finally, an inductive thematic analysis of the scenarios revealed interesting themes (e.g., types of rules, automation styles and novel operators) which can serve as a guide for designing more expressive and intuitive end-user development solutions, in the context of IoT.

New online stores and digital distribution methods have led to the development of alternative monetization models for video-games, such as free-to-play games with advertisements. Although there are many games using such models, until now the effect on the player experience from such interruptions has not been studied. In this controlled experiment, we requested that participants (N=236) play one of three different versions of a platformer game with: 1) no interruptions, 2) 30-second video advertisements, and 3) a multiple-choice questionnaire. We then evaluated the effects on the player experience. The study shows differences in their experiences, namely in: competence, immersion, annoyance, affects, and the reliability of the questionnaire answers. The contribution of this work is to identify which player experience variables are affected by interruptions, which can be valuable for selecting the business model and guiding the game design process.

To advance the research area of social robotics, it is important to understand the effect of different social cues on the perceived social agency to a robot. This paper evaluates three sets of verbal and nonverbal social cues (emotional intonation voice, facial expression and head movement) demonstrated by a social agent delivering several messages. A convenience sample of 18 participants interacted with SociBot, a robot that can demonstrate such cues, experienced in sequence seven sets of combinations of social cues. After each interaction, participants rated the robot's social agency (assessing its resemblance to a real person, and the extent to which they judged it to be like a living creature). As expected, adding social cues led to higher social agency judgments; especially facial expression was connected to higher social agency judgments.

Trying to understand a player's characteristics with regards to a computer game is a major line of research known as player modeling. The purpose of player modeling is typically the adaptation of the game itself. We present two studies that extend player modeling into player profiling by trying to identify abstract personality traits, such as the need for cognition and self-esteem , through a player's in-game behavior. We present evidence that game mechanics that can be broadly adopted by several game genres, such as hints and a player's self-evaluation at the end of a level, correlate with the aforementioned personality traits. We conclude by presenting future directions for research regarding this topic, discuss the direct applications for the games industry, and explore how games can be developed as profiling tools with applications to other contexts.

Design-based learning (DBL) is attracting increasing attention for its potential to support informal learning, and as a way to enhance science and technology education at schools. However, related research has not yet considered the emotions children experience during DBL and how these affect the learning process. We report a case study aimed at developing a deeper understanding of children's emotional experience during DBL. In total 9 children (12-13 years old) are involved in this case study. In order to assess children's emotions during DBL lessons we used a self-reporting non-verbal instrument (the emotion card, which adapted from Five Degrees of Happiness Smiley Face Likert) and a verbal instrument (the Geneva Emotion Wheel Questionnaire, which contains 16 emotions). In addition, a group interview probed into the role of children's emotion during DBL. We discuss the methodological challenges exposed in this study, which will need to be addressed in future studies regarding the measurement of children's emotions in DBL.

This paper presents a structured survey of 119 publications from the proceedings of the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC) from 2013 to 2017. This survey on research methods and purposes is based upon a classification schema used by many others in HCI research. An extra dimension was added to the classification of research methods pertaining to the Research Domains, in order to provide a more insightful overview of the field. An analysis of the research methods and purposes, and domains of ISWC is presented. Additionally, the citation impact of ISWC publications is evaluated and compared over these dimensions. Current tendencies of the research presented at ISWC are identified with focus on the contextual setting of the research. Opportunities for future research at ISWC are identified.

Applications of social robotics in different domains such as education, healthcare, or as companions to people living alone, often entail that robots will act as persuasive agents. However, persuasive attempts can give rise to psychological reactance where people have negative thoughts and emotions that limit adherence to the persuader. To understand the phenomenon of reactance to robotic persuaders, we investigate the effect of social cues of an artificial agent on psychological reactance and compliance. Participants in a laboratory experiment played a decision-making game in which persuasive attempts were delivered in one of three forms: as a persuasive-text, spoken by a social robot (the SocibotTM) displaying minimal social cues, or by the same robot displaying enhanced social cues. Our results suggest that a social robot with minimal social cues invokes the lowest reactance. Remarkably, exploratory analyses indicate cross-gender effects (between robot and user) upon invoking lower psychological reactance and female participants have higher compliance than male participants.

Research in smart textiles and garments has mostly focused on integrating sensing technology. In order to make garments that are truly interactive it is also essential to develop technologies for actuating smart garments and textiles. This paper introduces ShapeTex, a thermal shape changing fabric that uses laminate thermal expansion to actuate textiles. We present the design process and rationale for ShapeTex; we explain the fabrication process we have developed for making ShapeTex accessible to fashion designers and interaction designers. Based on co-creation sessions with designers we discuss requirements derived from this material. Finally we present a number of concept prototypes created to explore and illustrate the potential applications of ShapeTex.

This special issue presents highlights from ECCE 2018, the 30th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, which is the annual event of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics (EACE). EC...

Research studies and recruitment processes often rely on psychometric instruments to profile respondents with regards to their ethical orientation. Completing such questionnaires can be tedious and is prone to self-presentation bias. Noting how video games often expose players to complex plots, filled with dilemmas and morally dubious options, the opportunity emerges to evaluate player’s moral orientation by analysing their in-game behaviour. In order to explore the feasibility of such an approach, we examine how users’ moral judgment correlates with choices they make in non-linear narratives, frequently present in video games. An interactive narrative presenting several moral dilemmas was created. An initial user study (N = 80) revealed only weak correlations between the users’ choices and their ethical inclinations in all ethical scales. However, by training a genetic algorithm on this data set to quantify the influence of each branch on recognising moral inclination we found a strong positive correlation between choice behaviour and self-reported ethical inclinations on a second independent group of participants (N = 20). The contribution of this work is to demonstrate how genetic algorithms can be applied in interactive stories to profile users’ ethical stance.

Researchers who perform Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) studies tend to rely on informatics experts to set up and administer their data collection protocols with digital media. Contrary to standard surveys and questionnaires that are supported by widely available tools, setting up an EMA protocol is a substantial programming task. Apart from constructing the survey items themselves, researchers also need to design, implement, and test the timing and the contingencies by which these items are presented to respondents. Furthermore, given the wide availability of smartphones, it is becoming increasingly important to execute EMA studies on user-owned devices, which presents a number of software engineering challenges pertaining to connectivity, platform independence, persistent storage, and back-end control. We discuss TEMPEST, a web-based platform that is designed to support non-programmers in specifying and executing EMA studies. We discuss the conceptual model it presents to end-users, through an example of use, and its evaluation by 18 researchers who have put it to real-life use in 13 distinct research studies.

Well-known trends pertaining to the aging of population and the rising costs of healthcare motivate the development of rehabilitation technology. There is a considerable body of work in this area including efforts to make serious games, virtual reality and robotic applications. While innovative technologies have been introduced over the years, and often researchers produce promising experimental results, these technologies have not yet delivered the anticipated benefits. The causes for this apparent failure are evident when looking a closer look at the case of stroke rehabilitation, which is one of the heaviest researched topics for developing rehabilitation technologies. It is argued that improvements should be sought by centering the design on an understanding of patient needs, allowing patients, therapists and care givers in general to personalize solutions to the need of patients, effective feedback and motivation strategies to be implemented, and an in depth understanding of the socio-technical system in which the rehabilitation technology will be embedded. These are classic challenges that human computer interaction (HCI) researchers have been dealing with for years, which is why the field of rehabilitation technology requires considerable input from HCI researchers, and which explains the growing number of relevant HCI publications pertaining to rehabilitation. The talk reviews related research carried out at the Eindhoven University of Technology together with collaborating institutes, which has examined the value of tangible user interfaces and embodied interaction in rehabilitation, how designing playful interactions or games with a functional purpose., feedback design. I shall discuss the work we have done to develop rehabilitation technologies for the TagTrrainer system in the doctoral research of Daniel Tetteroo [2,3,4] and the explorations on wearable solutions in the doctoral research of Wang Qi.[5,6]. With our research being design driven and explorative, I will discuss also the current state of the art for the field and the challenges that need to be addressed for human computer interaction research to make a larger impact in the domain of rehabilitation technology.

Self-esteem is a personality trait utilized to support the diagnosis of several psychological conditions. With this study we investigate the potential that computer games can have in assessing self-esteem. To that end, we designed and developed a platformer game and analyzed how in-game behavior relates to Rosenberg's Self-Esteem Scale. We examined: i) how a player's self-esteem influences game performance, ii) how a player's self-esteem generally influences in-game behavior iii) the possible game mechanics that assist in inferring a player's self-esteem. The study was conducted in two phases (N=98 and N=85). Results indicate that self-esteem does not have any impact on the player's performance, on the other hand, we found that players' self-evaluation of game performance correlates with their self-esteem.

In many future social interactions between robots and humans, robots may need to convince people to change their behavior. People may dislike and resist such persuasive attempts, a phenomenon known as psychological reactance. This paper examines how reactance, measured in terms of negative cognitions and feelings of anger, is affected by the persuading agent's social agency cues and the level of controlling language used. Participants played a decision-making game in which a persuasive agent attempted to influence their choices exhibiting high or low controlling language, and three different levels of social agency. Results suggest that controlling language will lead to increased reactance when the persuasive agent does not exhibit social cues. Surprisingly, reactance is not affected by controlling language in the same way when the persuading agent is a social robot exhibiting social cues.

Since the widespread adoption of digital photography, people create many digital photos, often with the intention to use them for shared remembering. Practices around digital photography have changed along with advances in media sharing technologies such as smartphones, social media, and mobile connectivity. Although much research was done at the start of digital photography, commercially available tools for media-supported shared remembering still have many limitations. The objective of our research is to explore spatial and material design directions to better support the use of personal photos for collocated shared remembering. In this paper, we present seven design requirements that resulted from a redesign workshop with fifteen participants, and four design concepts (two spatial, two material) that we developed based on those requirements. By reflecting on the requirements and designs we conclude with challenges for interaction designers to support collocated remembering practices.

People accumulate large collections of digital photos, which they use for individual, social, and utilitarian purposes. In order to provide suitable technologies for enjoying our expanding photo collections, it is essential to understand how and to what purpose these collections are used. Contextual interviews with 12 participants in their homes explored the use of digital photos, incorporating new photo activities that are offered by new technologies. Based on the qualitative analysis of the collected data, we give an overview of current photo activities, which we term PhotoUse. We introduce a model of PhotoUse, which emphasises the purpose of photo activities rather than the tools to support them. We argue for the use of our model to design tools to support the user’s individual and social goals pertaining to PhotoUse.

It is a great honour to be appointed as the next editor-in-chief of Behaviour and Information Technology. As someone who has spent all his professional life working on different areas of the field ...

research-article Free Access Share on Editorial: End-User Development for the Internet of Things Editors: Panos Markopoulos Eindhoven University of Technology Eindhoven University of TechnologyView Profile , Jeffrey Nichols Google GoogleView Profile , Fabio Paternò CNR-ISTI CNR-ISTIView Profile , Volkmar Pipek University of Siegen University of SiegenView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 24Issue 2April 2017 Article No.: 9pp 1–3https://doi.org/10.1145/3054765Published:06 April 2017Publication History 19citation867DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations19Total Downloads867Last 12 Months75Last 6 weeks28 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

The realization and deployment of the Internet of Things require providing to non-programmers some level of programmatic control for tailoring system behaviour to their context and needs. We introduce a simple context-range semantics (CRS) and a context-range editor (CoRE) that support end users formulate and understand logical expressions regarding context. The editor builds on two key ideas (a) contextual information is used to evaluate and minimize logical expressions; (b) logical expressions are presented in a disjunctive normal form (DNF) thus applying a principle established in mental model theory. User tests reveal situations in which the theory regarding the intuitiveness of the DNF needs to be extended with a new element: Logical terms are easier to comprehend and formulate when grouped according to their semantic affinity. We report two experiments that demonstrate the intuitiveness of this approach and how it improves performance of non-programmers in specifying context sensitive system behaviour.

Outdoor, multi-player games involving social interaction and physical activity are an emerging class of applications particularly interesting for children, for whom the attraction and the health and developmental benefits are clear cut. Implementing and prototyping such games present non-trivial technical challenges to interaction and game designers; this hampers iterative prototyping and testing cycles that are core to user-centred design and game development processes. This insight has motivated the development of RaPIDO (Rapid prototyping of Physical Interaction Design for Outdoor games), a prototyping platform for physical computing, targeting interaction designers with limited electronics or software skills. RaPIDO has been evaluated in a user test, evaluating RaPIDOs software library, and in a case study involving two designers who used it to develop outdoor games for children. We illustrate how RaPIDO enabled broader exploration of the design space and faster iterations than would otherwise be possible, allowing designers to focus on the core game concepts rather than complex and low-level engineering issues.

Designers adopt a large amount of generalpurpose tools for supporting their remote collaborative tasks.Each tool provides very diverse functionalities: from file sharing to instant communication and video collaboration.The designer struggles when filtering and combining the right information spread across the multitude of tools.This research extends McGrath's framework of task circumflex to map the collaborative demands of the design practitioner and proposes Peepdeck, a design exploration to support them.Peepdeck is a dashboard that assembles information scattered across multiple tools in a personalized and organized way.Through two design iterations followed by evaluations of the user interface, several requirements were identified for supporting collaboration awareness in design teams.Insights confirmed the relevance of combining information from different but already familiar tools, rather than attempting to replace them.It was identified the importance of optimizing for visual scanning, supporting search of content and allowing users to customize the tool.I. INTRODUCTION esign studios operate in a much more distributed fashion nowadays than in the past.Designers may be distributed geographically, potentially even in different time zones.This paper discusses the design of an application for supporting distributed collaborative design work.There is a myriad of new tools and online services available as shown by Fig 1. Tools like Dropbox, GoogleApps, Basecamp, Atlassian, Slack, Skype and Trello are just some examples of the diversity of commercial applications available on the Internet that support teamwork in the design studio.These technologies support very diverse functionalities and services, from file sharing, online edition of documents to instant communication and video collaboration.Previous research [13] revealed a collection of patterns of behavior that the designers conduct in the context of collaboration tools.A surprising finding was that designers adopt a large amount of generic tools that they appropriate for supporting collaborative design tasks, choosing different tools for different parts of the design process.Tools like

Player behavior during game play can be used to construct player models that help adapt the game and make it more fun for the player involved. Similarly in-game behavior could help model personality traits that describe people's attitudes in a fashion that can be stable over time and over different domains, e.g., to support health coaching, or other behavior change approaches. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of this approach by relating Need for Cognition (NfC) a personality trait that can predict the effectiveness of different persuasion strategies upon users to a commonly used game mechanic -- hints. An experiment with N=188 participants confirmed our hypothesis that NfC has a negative correlation with the number of hints players follow during the game. Future work should confirm if adherence to hints can be used as a predictor of behavior in different games, and to find other game mechanics than hints, that help predict user traits.

'Viewing while commuting' is a typical use case for mobile video. However, experimental and behavioral influences of watching three-dimensional (3D) video in vibrating vehicles have not been widely researched. The goal of this study is 1) to explore the influence of video presentation modes (two-dimensional and stereoscopic 3D) on the quality of experience and 2) to understand the nature of the movement patterns that users perform to maintain an optimal viewing position while viewing videos on a mobile device in three commuting contexts and in a controlled laboratory environment. A hybrid method for quality evaluation was used for combining quantitative preference ratings, qualitative descriptions of quality, situational audio/video data-collection, and sensors. The high-quality and heterogeneous audiovisual stimuli were viewed on a mobile device equipped with a parallax barrier display. The results showed that the stereoscopic 3D (S3D) video presentation mode provided more satisfying quality of experience than the two-dimensional presentation mode in all studied contexts. To maintain an optimal viewing position in the vehicles, the users moved the device in their hands to the directions around the vertical and the horizontal axes in a leaned sitting position. This movement behavior was guided by the contexts but not by the quality, indicating the general importance of these results for mobile video viewing in vibrating vehicles.

Interactive devices can support personal remembering to benefit well-being. These designs require insight into what brings the past to mind, and how people relate to such cues. Prior work focused on mementos in the home; instead, this paper presents a diary and interview study of involuntary memory cueing in everyday life. Data was collected from fifteen adult individuals, using sentence completion diaries, combined with debriefing interviews. Qualitative analysis of the data showed that these participants were relying on everyday physical objects like food items for cueing memories during everyday life, locations and (repeated) activities, while digital items and photos were shown to be less frequent stimulants. Meaningful relations to memory cues can be partially explained from a memory cueing perspective. We discuss how design for remembering can benefit from our insights, through careful trade-offs in timing, exposure to cues, and supporting a process of personal attachment with items invoking memories.

Clinical researchers in rehabilitation technology have often called for exercise customization to address patient specific needs. Where such customization transcends simple parameter setting, the need for End-User Development (EUD) arises. EUD in this field can potentially tap on the expertise of highly skilled workers, but presents serious challenges regarding acceptance by end users and the feasibility of embedding EUD in their professional practice. This paper describes the deployment and adoption process of TagTrainer, a physical rehabilitation technology that supports EUD. TagTrainer was deployed in four rehabilitation clinics and was used by 24 rehabilitation therapists. We analyze how they engaged in EUD activities and we discuss decisions that we took in the design and deployment of TagTrainer. Based on these case studies, we present guidelines for the deployment of EUD systems.

Technologies for shape-changing user interfaces are rapidly evolving, but our understanding of the design space of such interfaces is still limited. We report a repertory grid study that aims to describe the design space from the users' point of view by eliciting personal constructs about shape-change. The study is based on six similar-sized, shape-changing artifacts that combine simple sensing of users with actuation that change volume, texture, and orientation. Our results show that the 18 respondents distinguish artifacts on dimensions that differ from those of most models of shape change. For instance, they characterize shape-change in terms of personality, territoriality, and state of mind, in addition to more common categories such as appearance and product properties. We discuss how the dimensions derived from users might be used to design shape-changing interfaces.

In traditional outdoor games, such as tag and hideandseek, children play in groups, and typically changes to the rules are negotiated fluidly, without disrupting the game flow. In contrast, games that are supported by interactive technology are usually rather static, not allowing for easy adaption towards the children's narrative and desired rules. We present an iterative design process in which 65 children aged 512 participated in different iterations, concluding with the design of GameBaker. GameBaker is an application that allows children to modify game rules for Head Up Games, outdoor collocated games supported by interactive handheld devices. We show how children: understand how setting different game rules allows them to modify the game, are able to relate these to how the game is played, and enjoy doing so. This research paves the way towards allowing children to take control of outdoor game technology, to create their own variation of games as they have done for centuries in traditional games.

The growth of tangible and embodied interfaces has lead them to expand from research labs to everyday life. This has raised the question of enduser development and the user requirements for an environment supporting development. This paper researches the user requirements for a toolkit to create interactive outdoor games for children, by adults with no programming skills. We present a case study in which adults designed such games and tested them with children. For the design and testing of the games, RaPIDO, a platform specially designed for prototyping interactive technology, was used. Based on this experience we identify requirements for a toolkit to support the creation of interactive outdoor games.

As CSCW creates and investigates technologies for social communication, it is important to understand the emotional benefits and costs of these systems. We propose the Affec-tive Benefits and Costs of Communication Technologies (ABCCT) questionnaire to supplement traditional qualita-tive methods of understanding communication media. We discuss the pilots of this survey with 45 children and 110 adults measuring the inter-item reliability of this instru-ment. We present the results of interviews with 14 children and 14 adults, which help confirm that the ABCCT measures the same constructs that may emerge through interview investigations. Finally, we demonstrate that the ABCCT is sensitive enough to discriminate between differ-ent communication technologies and has shown promise in some of its early adoption. Though the ABCCT is not with-out limitations, it may provide a way to compare technolo-gies in field deployments, draw findings across investiga-tions, and quantify the impact of specific design decisions.

This paper reflects on the design process of games that are played by multiple players, involving high pace activity and embodied interaction. More specifically it argues that user testing with low fidelity prototypes, which is recommended in mainstream literature on methodology in the fields of human computer interaction and game design, is not appropriate when designing these kind of games. Designers should instead, as early as possible in the design process, experiment with technology and expose working prototypes to play test with children. A case study, in which we designed several games and tested in three iterations, is also presented. The games were designed for and tested with RaPIDO, a specially designed platform for prototyping mobile and interactive technology. Finally, we argue that our hypothesis regarding technology-rich prototyping is confirmed, since the feedback from the children concerned the realized interaction, and aspects of play and social interaction were experienced in real context, instead of an imagined way as a mock-up would have allowed.

As tangible and embodied systems are making the transition from the labs to everyday life, there is a growth in the applications related research and design work in this field. We argue that the potential of these technologies can be even further leveraged by enabling domain experts such as teachers, therapists and home owners to act as end-user developers in order to modify and create content for their tangible interactive systems. However, there are important issues that need to be addressed if we want to enable these end users to act as developers. In this paper we identify five key challenges for meta-designers in enabling end-users to develop for tangible and embodied interaction.

This paper addresses the need of interpersonal privacy coordination mechanisms in the context of mediated communication, emphasizing the dialectic and dynamic nature of privacy. We contribute the Privacy Grounding Model—built upon the Common Ground theory—that describes how connected individuals create and adapt privacy borders dynamically and in a collaborative process. We present the theoretical foundations of the model. We also show the applicability of the model, where we give evidence from a field study that illustrates how it can describe privacy coordination mechanisms amongst users of an instant messaging application and a desktop awareness system. The model describes efficient and effective factors that communicators consider in their decisions to use mechanisms for coordination. The Privacy Grounding Model aims to help designers reflect on how their system supports, or fails to support, people’s need for lightweight and distinctive privacy coordination mechanisms, and in particular how communicators within the system create and use privacy border representations for grounding their needs to interact with each other.

This article describes the use of personalized short text messages (SMS) to reduce snacking. First, we describe the development and validation ( N = 215) of a questionnaire to measure individual susceptibility to different social influence strategies. To evaluate the external validity of this Susceptibility to Persuasion Scale (STPS) we set up a two week text-messaging intervention that used text messages implementing social influence strategies as prompts to reduce snacking behavior. In this experiment ( N = 73) we show that messages that are personalized (tailored) to the individual based on their scores on the STPS, lead to a higher decrease in snacking consumption than randomized messages or messages that are not tailored (contra-tailored) to the individual. We discuss the importance of this finding for the design of persuasive systems and detail how designers can use tailoring at the level of social influence strategies to increase the effects of their persuasive technologies.

The school context provides a fruitful and at the same challenging environment to get children engaged in creative development activities. Within this paper we highlight the opportunities and challenges when involving children in the design and development process of interactive technologies with a special focus on this educational context. A summary of the contributions to this IDC 2011 workshop is provided pointing out the main highlights from the position papers. We conclude by discussing future research challenges and opportunities when working with children in the school context.

Large differences in individual responses to persuasive strategies suggest the need for systems that rely on persuasion profiles: estimates of an individual user's susceptibility to different persuasive strategies. Establishing an empirical ground supporting decisions regarding user involvement can provide valuable guidelines for the design of such systems. We describe two studies examining the effects of choice, disclosure, and multiple strategy usage on user compliance to persuasive attempts. We show that involving users in the selection of a specific influence strategy can increase compliance, while disclosing the persuasive intent can reduce compliance. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is not only feasible, but optimal to choose the single correct influence strategy for a given context; even more so than implementing multiple relevant and congruent influence attempts.

This paper describes an investigation of different variations of the robotic intervention protocol, a method for obtaining verbalization data from children during evaluation that involves using a social robot as a proxy for a test facilitator to prompt, ask, and help children thus encouraging them to verbalize their thoughts and experiences. A number of variations of this verbalization protocol were implemented and tried out, leading to guidelines for the application of the method and for the implementation of social robots aimed to support it.

In designing communication technology for children, it is important to understand the affective benefits and costs introduced by a particular medium. We present an Affective Benefits and Costs of Communication Technologies Questionnaire appropriate for use with native English-speaking children aged 8--10. We discuss the iterative design and testing of the survey instrument and provide the current survey items.

Likert-type scales are used extensively during usability evaluations, and more generally evaluations of interactive experiences, to obtain quantified data regarding attitudes, behaviors, and judgments of participants. Very often this data is analyzed using parametric statistics like the Student t-test or ANOVAs. These methods are chosen to ensure higher statistical power of the test (which is necessary in this field of research and practice where sample sizes are often small), or because of the lack of software to handle multi-factorial designs nonparametrically. With this paper we present to the HCI audience new developments from the field of medical statistics that enable analyzing multiple factor designs nonparametrically. We demonstrate the necessity of this approach by showing the errors in the parametric treatment of nonparametric data in experiments of the size typically reported in HCI research. We also provide a practical resource for researchers and practitioners who wish to use these new methods.

Current pervasive games are mostly location-aware applications, played on handheld computing devices. Considering pervasive games for children, it is argued that the interaction paradigm existing games support limits essential aspects of outdoor play like spontaneous social interaction, physical movement, and rich face-to-face communication. We present a new genre of pervasive games conceived to address this problem, that we call “Head Up Games” (HUGs) to underline that they liberate players from facing down to attend to screen-based interactions. The article discusses characteristics of HUG and relates them to existing genres of pervasive games. We present lessons learned during the design and evaluation of three HUG and chart future challenges.

We describe the design and evaluation of Playground Architect, a multi-player game designed to help shy children gain social confidence. The game is played by a small group of children around an interactive tabletop surface using a tangible user interface. The game was evaluated with 32 children (mean age 9.5). All players enjoyed the game. Shy children enjoyed being in charge and were quite talkative during play. Interviews with teachers show that some shy children behaved notably more outgoing. These results illustrate the potential of socially educational games.

In this paper we report a case study where two versions of the same outdoor pervasive game were compared: one featuring a virtual game object and the other with a tangible representation of it. Our aim was to explore the effect on social interaction and physical activity; two characteristics of Head-Up Games. Based on evaluation with 27 children we can conclude that both approaches support Head-Up Games well, and offer different design opportunities that should be explored further.

This paper reports the design of a pervasive game for children to demonstrate the design vision of Head-Up games, a genre of pervasive games that puts outdoors play center stage, combining the benefits of traditional outdoor games with the opportunities for richer experiences and innovation offered by new media. The design of the game, called HeartBeat, explores the use of physiological sensing and more specifically heart rate measurement as input to the game and as an approach to enhance the pervasive gaming experience. Evaluation with 32 children outdoors showed how the game promotes physical activity and social interaction between children in ways one would expect from traditional outdoor games.

Recent technologies supporting continuous connectivity enable sustained awareness within social networks, which eventually boosts interaction and therefore the need of individuals to manage their interpersonal privacy. This paper introduces the Privacy Grounding Model that describes how people develop and use mechanisms to establish a shared understanding of their intentions to interact with others. The main design implication of this model is the need for lightweight interactive mechanisms by which individuals can collaboratively ground needs for interaction. To illustrate how the model supports the design of grounding mechanisms, we present examples and discuss a case study that informs about their use during several weeks.

This article describes research into online electronic payment systems, focusing on the aspects of payment systems that are critical for their acceptance by end users. Based on our earlier research and a diary study of payments with an online payment system and with online banking systems of a reputable bank, we proposed a set of 12 interaction design guidelines. The guidelines have been applied during the implementation and redesign of a new payment system. An extensive experimental comparison of the original version of the system with the one designed according to the design guidelines has provided confirmation of the relevance and adequacy of these guidelines for designing online payment systems.

This paper introduces robot intervention, a novel approach to usability testing with children. A social robot is used as a proxy for a test administrator who conducts an active intervention session remotely in a Wizard of Oz fashion. The motivation of the technique is that children will feel at ease and enjoy interacting with the social robot, and thus produce more frequent and informative verbalizations regarding their interaction with the product under test. First experiences regarding this method are positive with regards to the feasibility of the method and with regards to how well it is received by children.

This paper discusses our experience with combining Cultural Probes and Experience Sampling as a design research method for inquiries involving young children. While we report on just a single case, we believe this to be a valuable experience showing some of the problems that have to be addressed in surveying emotions and experiences over time, some of the solutions we proposed but also the potential of the method.

This paper presents Reconexp, a diary method supported by a distributed application, which partly runs on a mobile device and partly on a website, enabling us to survey user attitudes, experiences and requirements in field studies. Reconexp combines aspects of the Experience Sampling Method and the Day Reconstruction Method aiming to reduce data loss, improve data quality and reduce burden put upon participants. We discuss our first experiences of using this method in the context of a study of communication needs of working parents with young children.

We are interested in systems that support awareness between individuals, by exchanging information that is automatically captured and presenting it to members of their social network. Here we demonstrate a principle for the operation of these systems which we describe as pervasive awareness: awareness information is aggregated opportunistically as mobile devices carrying some information migrate across space and cluster dynamically. We present a minimal demonstration of the principle where qualitative location information is used to select information offered by context capture devices (for the demonstration these are cameras).

This paper discusses a design case, which explores the potential of psychophysiological measures as an input technique for social gaming applications intended for children. aMAZEd is an example of a tabletop mixed reality game that supports social interaction between players through and around the game. It is clear that sensing technology used to obtain psychophysiological measures needs to be improved and there is still a range of solutions that need to be explored. However, our experience shows that psychophysiological input appeals to children and can be a fun element of games supporting social interaction among players.

Panos Markopoulos studied computer science and specialized in human-computer interaction. His research concerns intra-family communication, privacy and interaction design for children. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Industrial Design of the Eindhoven University of Technology. Boris de Ruyter is an experimental psychologist with an interest in applying user modeling and psychometric techniques in the domains of consumer electronics, personal healthcare and lighting. He is a Principal Scientist at Philips Research leading the Cognitive and Behavioural Insights capability group and the Interactive Healthcare Solutions research programme. Wendy Mackay was trained in experimental psychology and computer science with an interest in multi-media, mixed reality and multidisciplinary design. She is a Research Director at INRIA in France and heads the in|situ| research group at INRIA Futurs and the University of Paris-Sud.

This paper describes a study which examines whether a predictive evaluation method (SEEM) is suitable to assess products for an older age group than for which the evaluation method was originally developed. SEEM stands for Structured Expert Evaluation Method and is an analytical evaluation method especially developed for assessing the fun and usability of young children's educational computer games (children from 5 to 7 years old). In the present study SEEM was applied to assess educational computer games for children between 9 and 11 years old. Outcomes on scores for thoroughness (whether SEEM finds all problems), validity (whether SEEM makes predictions that are likely to be true) and appropriateness (whether SEEM is applied correctly) were compared. The results show that the trends for the thoroughness and the validity are the same for the two different age groups; however SEEM scores a bit better for the oldest age group. The appropriateness scores are about the same for the two age groups. The results indicate that SEEM can also be applied for assessing educational computer games for children between 9 and 11 years old.

This paper describes the design of Camelot, a mobile outdoor game for small groups of children aged 7-10. Camelot was designed with the aim to encourage social interaction between the players and to encourage physical activity. The paper extends the research literature on design methodology for children, by recording and reflecting upon the lessons learnt by applying a range of techniques for involving children in the design of interactive systems.

This paper presents the design of pOwerball, a novel augmented reality computer game for children aged 8-14. The pOwerball was designed to bring together children with and without a physical or learning disability and to encourage social interactions surrounding the play. The contribution of this design case is two fold. From a design perspective, pOwerball exemplifies an emerging class of computer games where the interaction style and game mechanics support social interactions amongst the players. From a methodological perspective, we describe the various ways children became involved in our design process; we highlight the related difficulties and successes in the context of relevant research literature.

This paper reports the user study and design of a concept to improve mobile messaging for teens. A study of current mobile phone use by teens (16-18) showed that, while they prefer communicating by Short Message Service (SMS), they miss expressiveness in this application. An enhanced SMS application, SenseMS, is designed to support affective communication. An evaluation of a SenseMS prototype has shown that enhancing text messages with contextual information and human embodiment can result in a more pleasant experience for both the sender and receiver. Especially for negative emotions, contextual and emotional information are essential for interpreting the message. The study also showed different usage scenarios, in that SenseMS is preferred for emotion-rich messages, whereas SMS is more appropriate for fast and emotion-poor messages.

In the current paper we hypothesize that providing peripheral awareness information to remotely located but socially close individuals will yield affective user benefits. An experiment in a controlled home-like environment was conducted to investigate the effects of providing different levels of peripheral awareness information on these affective benefits. In the experiment peripheral awareness aimed to support groups of friends to jointly watch a soccer match at remote locations. The experiment has shown that providing awareness information increases the social presence and the group attraction felt by individuals towards their remote partners. The experiment has provided concrete quantitative and qualitative evidence for the hypothesized benefits of supporting primary relationships through awareness systems and of the relevance of social presence as a requirement in the design of peripheral awareness displays.

This paper reports an exploration of the concept of social intelligence in the context of designing home dialogue systems for an Ambient Intelligence home. It describes a Wizard of Oz experiment involving a robotic interface capable of simulating several human social behaviours. Our results show that endowing a home dialogue system with some social intelligence will: (a) create a positive bias in the user’s perception of technology in the home environment, (b) enhance user acceptance for the home dialogue system, and (c) trigger social behaviours by the user in relation to the home dialogue system.

We describe an experimental study of different strategies for obtaining verbalization data, when conducting a usability test with children. Two software products were evaluated by 25 children of ages 9-11, at their school, using think aloud and post-task interviews. We have found confirmatory evidence, in support of earlier tentative results, that children reported more usability problems with think aloud rather than with post-task interviews and girls reported more problems than boys. However, when we counted also the usability problems identified through observation, we found no significant difference between the two methods or between the two genders.

This editorial paper introduces an emerging area for human–computer interaction research, which concerns interaction design and children. To avoid treating children as a homogeneous user group, it discusses some perspectives on their development, their use of technology for entertainment and education and, finally, how to involve children in the various stages of the design process.

The paper motivates the need to acquire methodological knowledge for involving children as test users in usability testing. It introduces a methodological framework for delineating comparative assessments of usability testing methods for children participants. This framework consists in three dimensions: (1) assessment criteria for usability testing methods, (2) characteristics describing usability testing methods and, finally, (3) characteristics of children that may impact upon the process and the result of usability testing. Two comparative studies are discussed in the context of this framework along with implications for future research.

Journal Article Composition and synthesis with a formal interactor model Get access Panos Markopoulos, Panos Markopoulos * Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Wesfield College, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK *Corresponding author. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jon Rowson, Jon Rowson Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Wesfield College, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Peter Johnson Peter Johnson Department of Computer Science, Queen Mary and Wesfield College, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Interacting with Computers, Volume 9, Issue 2, 3 November 1997, Pages 197–223, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0953-5438(97)00011-8 Published: 03 November 1997