Toolkits like the Arduino system have brought embedded programming to STEM education. However, learning embedded programming is still hard, requiring an understanding of coding, electronics, and how both sides interact. To investigate the opportunities of using a different programming paradigm than the imperative approach to learning embedded coding, we developed Flowboard . Students code in a visual iPad editor using flow-based programming , which is conceptually closer to circuit diagrams than imperative code. Two breadboards with I/O pins mirrored on the iPad connect electronics and program graph more seamlessly than existing IDEs. Program changes take effect immediately. This liveness reflects circuit behavior better than edit-compile-run loops. A first study confirmed that students can solve basic embedded programming tasks with Flowboard while highlighting important differences to a typical imperative IDE, Ardublock. A second, in-depth study provided qualitative insights into Flowboard’s impact on students’ conceptual models of electronics and embedded programming and exploring.

Growing and even excessive use of digital technology has unquestionably fuelled demand for digital devices and online services leading to a wide range of societal and environmental impacts. In sustainability terms, ICT as a whole is estimated to produce up to nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. As presumed responsible innovators, the HCI community should now consider design strategies that will reduce use and demand for digital technology for the good of both its users and the planet—strategies perhaps even seen as retrogressive in an era where digital technology is constantly implicated in innovation and economic growth. Prior work has noted the potential to design “more moderate” interactions for sustainability, simultaneously addressing negative societal impacts on users’ wellbeing, relationships, productivity at work, and privacy. In this paper, we explore how we may design intentionally moderate digital interactions that retain our participants’ “more meaningful” experiences. We report on the outcomes of two design workshops to uncover experiences of meaningful device and service use, to inform practical designs for ‘moderate and meaningful’ interaction. From this, we offer design recommendations that aim to address the multiple negative impacts that digital technology can create, and discuss the possible barriers to these designs.

Understanding users is central to design and Human-Computer Interaction, both for researchers and for practitioners, who often conduct user research and communicate its value to stakeholders and clients. Despite its praised relevance, we know little about how user research affects design creativity. Our objective is to establish a foundation for answering this question. We first review empirical findings from related domains and examine how the value of user research is linked to design creativity. We then present a pilot study for a large-scale experimental setup to determine how different levels of user research influence design creativity. Finally, we discern preliminary insights on the relationship and provides recommendations for how future studies may investigate the critical and complex relationship between user research and design creativity.

The design and development of Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) is of growing interest in research at the intersection of creativity and Human-Computer Interaction, and has been identified as a 'grand challenge for HCI'. While creativity research and HCI each have had long-standing discussions about---and rich toolboxes of---evaluation methodologies, the nascent field of CST evaluation has so far received little attention. We contribute a survey of 113 research papers that present and evaluate CSTs, and we offer recommendations for future CST evaluation. We center our discussion around six major points that researchers might consider: 1) Clearly define the goal of the CST; 2) link to theory to further understanding of usage of CSTs; 3) recruit domain experts, if applicable and feasible; 4) consider longitudinal, in-situ studies; 5) distinguish and decide whether to evaluate usability or creativity; and 6) as a community, help develop a toolbox for CST evaluation.

We present GazeConduits, a calibration-free ad-hoc mobile interaction concept that enables users to collaboratively interact with tablets, other users, and content in a cross-device setting using gaze and touch input. GazeConduits leverages recently introduced smartphone capabilities to detect facial features and estimate users' gaze directions. To join a collaborative setting, users place one or more tablets onto a shared table and position their phone in the center, which then tracks users present as well as their gaze direction to determine the tablets they look at. We present a series of techniques using GazeConduits for collaborative interaction across mobile devices for content selection and manipulation. Our evaluation with 20 simultaneous tablets on a table shows that GazeConduits can reliably identify which tablet or collaborator a user is looking at.

People often operate their smartphones with only one hand, using just their thumb for touch input. With today's larger smartphones, this leads to a reachability issue: Users can no longer comfortably touch everywhere on the screen without changing their grip. We investigate using the head tracking in modern smartphones to address this reachability issue. We developed three interaction techniques, pure head (PH), head + touch (HT), and head area + touch (HA), to select targets beyond the reach of one's thumb. In two user studies, we found that selecting targets using HT and HA had higher success rates than the default direct touch (DT) while standing (by about 9%) and walking (by about 12%), while being moderately slower. HT and HA were also faster than one of the best techniques, BezelCursor (BC) (by about 20% while standing and 6% while walking), while having the same success rate.

On the basis of a qualitative study of five domains of creative work, this paper analyzes two recurring strategies in the use of digital tools, 'margins' and 'view-shifts'. These strategies are commonly employed by creative professionals across five different domains. Based on video from observational studies of music producers, video production, industrial design, graphic design, and service design, we conduct a thematic analysis to arrive at the two strategies. We furthermore examine the two strategies in relation to existing research into creativity and cognition, and discuss how this can inform future studies of the use of digital tools in creative work.

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) play a fundamental role in the study of creativity in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Even so, there is no consensus definition of the term 'CST' in HCI, and in most studies, CSTs have been construed as one-off exploratory prototypes, typically built by the researchers themselves. This makes it difficult to clearly demarcate CST research, but also to compare findings across studies, which impedes advancement in digital creativity as a growing field of research. Based on a literature review of 143 papers from the ACM Digital Library (1999-2018), we contribute a first overview of the key characteristics of CSTs developed by the HCI community. Moreover, we propose a tentative definition of a CST to help strengthen knowledge sharing across CST studies. We end by discussing our study's implications for future HCI research on CSTs and digital creativity.

We present Videostrates, a concept and a toolkit for creating real-time collaborative video editing tools. Videostrates supports both live and recorded video composition with a declarative HTML-based notation, combining both simple and sophisticated editing tools that can be used collaboratively. Videostrates is programmable and unleashes the power of the modern web platform for video manipulation. We demonstrate its potential through three use scenarios: collaborative video editing with multiple tools and devices; orchestration of multiple live streams that are recorded and broadcast to a popular streaming platform; and programmatic creation of video using WebGL and shaders for blue screen effects. These scenarios only scratch the surface of Videostrates' potential, which opens up a design space for novel collaborative video editors with fully programmable interfaces.

The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research.

This note discusses opportunities for the HCI community to engage with environmental public policy. It draws on insights and observations made during the primary author's recent work for a policy unit at Global Affairs Canada, which is a federal ministry of the Government of Canada. During that work, the primary author identified several domains of environmental public policy that are of direct relevance to the HCI community. This note contributes a preliminary discussion of how, why, with whom, and in what capacity HCI researchers and practitioners might engage with three types of environmental public policy: climate change, waste electrical and electronic equipment, and green ICT procurement policies. This builds on existing public policy and environmental knowledge within the HCI community and responds directly to calls from some members to engage with environmental public policy.

Despite significant progress in sustainable HCI towards theoretical frameworks to guide design, there is a gap between theory and practice, so that the impact of such frameworks is limited. As an initial exploration in bridging the theory-practice gap, we conducted a study using one well-established design framework, the Attachment Framework, to evaluate its applicability in use. We conducted a comparative study with 14 designers to explore the effect of the Attachment Framework on design, and evaluated their designs with 10 design experts using a set of six design criteria. Our results indicated a positive effect on the criterion of novelty, with mixed effects on attachment, presentation, aesthetics, usefulness, and feasibility. We contribute a set of challenges in the application of design frameworks to practice and offer a critical reflection on how researchers can more effectively communicate sustainable HCI design frameworks to practitioners.

We introduce dynamic physical properties as an additional degree of freedom for passive tabletop controls. Using electromagnetic actuation, we manipulate attributes of tangibles on the fly, such as perceived weight, spring resistance, friction, and latching. We describe our actuation concepts, prototypes, and measurements showing that magnetic fields can change physical effects in a linear way. Controlled experiments reveal that participants can tactually distinguish four rendered resistance levels of a button prototype and easily detect dynamic detents in a continuous slider. Finally, we describe how adjustable physical properties in tangibles can enhance tabletop interaction.