Managing social batteries is crucial in highly interactive environments such as open-plan offices. To support both the internal self-management of one's own social battery and the external coordination of interactions with others, we designed Sotate, a device that visualizes social batteries. Sotate uses a gauge-style LED display to represent a user's social battery level and physical placement to indicate when the user is engaged in recharging activities. Our three-week field study with four groups revealed that participants used social battery representations not only to reflect their internal states, but also to intentionally express non-literal states to manage external communication. We also found that explicitly marking the beginning and end of recharging made recharging activities more deliberate and reflective, and that colleagues relied on simple, immediately interpretable cues rather than precise numerical values when coordinating interactions. These results highlight design considerations for systems that support the management of internal states associated with social interaction.

While the rapid exchange of messages in instant messaging (IM) is useful for maintaining convenient and continuous communication, it can simultaneously diminish recipients’ opportunities to reflect on and emotionally engage with individual messages. This paper introduces Adilet, a system that represents the process of composing and receiving delayed messages through a physical device, designed to enhance message awareness, perceived value, and reflective engagement. Adilet allows users to ensure the status of writing, sending, and receiving messages and approximate total writing time. A field study with four groups of two close partners demonstrated that Adilet improved message quality by increasing participants' awareness on both writing and reception. Furthermore, consistent awareness of message presence and clues about message content enhanced anticipation. Our findings suggest further implications for designing communication systems that support deeper and more valuable emotional exchange by improving message value and recognition in close relationships.

Mood is influenced by complex factors and involves subjective interpretation, leading to diverse methods of recording it. While existing tools provide customizable features, they often fall short in promoting deep reflection and meaningful engagement. We developed Lino, an interactive system that includes single stroke drawing records created in a mobile app and a desktop frame designed for archiving these drawings and supporting the attachment of optional voice recordings. Through a three-week field study with six participants, we found that participants make meaning in the process of reframing their daily moods into single stroke drawings and continuously refined these recordings through interactions in their everyday spaces. Our findings imply considerations for empowering users through personal interpretation for meaning-making process in data collection and visualization for effective personal informatics system and supporting evolving personal reflective practices.

In open-plan offices, face-to-face (F2F) interruptions frequently occur to facilitate collaboration and cooperation with colleagues. We designed Pati & Bellio to support the coordination of F2F interruptions in open-plan offices. Pati is a partition-style personal device that visualizes availability for F2F interruptions and Bellio is a shared interface that allows users to send notifications to their colleagues from a distance. Our three-week in field study with four groups of participants reveals that examining the process of F2F interruptions helps determine the importance of the interruption, and the physical distance provided by Pati and Bellio naturally allowed time to prepare for conversations. We also identified how the visualized availability is considered after an interruption begins. Our findings imply considerations in designing systems to support coordinating social interaction in work environments.

Accumulating a life history is a valuable resource for understanding self and reflecting on personal historical experience, which could be developed through diary writing. To facilitate the recording of past events in a diary, we designed and implemented Rebulb, a system that enables users to engage with reflective questions about proud moments and document memories evoked for accumulating one's life history. Our four-month field study with three participants showed that users intentionally and spontaneously recalled vague and wide memories during their daily activity and then concretized these memories by writing them down in a journal. The study also revealed that regardless of whether the memories were positive or negative, the current state of the user played a crucial role in how these memories were processed and reflected upon. Our finding imply consideration in designing a tool for supporting the recall and documentation of past experiences.

Capturing people’s spontaneous thoughts or daily emotions in their everyday living space can be difficult and can pose a psychological burden from a clinical standpoint. To address this issue, we have developed EmotionFrame, which allows users to archive their daily experiences by recording videos of their current thoughts and emotions at home. EmotionFrame serves as a journaling device, and the parameters for journaling have been determined based on a depression assessment model. This study explores the benefits of users’ recording feelings about their daily events, which can also help with assessing depressive mood with the journaling data. Our three-week in-field study with eight participants showed that EmotionFrame could be integrated into participants’ daily routines based on their previous diary-writing habits. In addition, its harmonious frame shape fits in with the everyday environment. Being able to engage in spontaneous journaling in private spaces – and in a way that allowed them to see themselves – prompted the study participants to effectively record their sincere thoughts and emotions during the archiving process.

As online news increasingly include data journalism, there is a corresponding increase in the incorporation of visualization in article thumbnail images. However, little research exists on the design rationale for visualization thumbnails, such as resizing, cropping, simplifying, and embellishing charts that appear within the body of the associated article. Therefore, in this paper we aim to understand these design choices and determine what makes a visualization thumbnail inviting and interpretable. To this end, we first survey visualization thumbnails collected online and discuss visualization thumbnail practices with data journalists and news graphics designers. Based on the survey and discussion results, we then define a design space for visualization thumbnails and conduct a user study with four types of visualization thumbnails derived from the design space. The study results indicate that different chart components play different roles in attracting reader attention and enhancing reader understandability of the visualization thumbnails. We also find various thumbnail design strategies for effectively combining the charts' components, such as a data summary with highlights and data labels, and a visual legend with text labels and Human Recognizable Objects (HROs), into thumbnails. Ultimately, we distill our findings into design implications that allow effective visualization thumbnail designs for data-rich news articles. Our work can thus be seen as a first step toward providing structured guidance on how to design compelling thumbnails for data stories.

The remote communication within intimate groups can be challenging due to lack of or excessive of non-verbal messages, which lack physicality. In this paper, we introduce Stubbi, a device designed to enhance remote text and voice communication in small intimate groups by enabling the exchange of simple physical movements. Each group member is equipped with Stubbi, which consists of three stubs that represent each person and enable the expression of physical movements through height changes and rotation. Our in-lab study involving six groups of three friends revealed that Stubbi effectively maintained the flow of IM conversations by increasing attentiveness and responsiveness. Additionally, in group voice calls, the exchange of personified messages through physical movements of the stubs assisted group interactions, such as turn-taking. Our findings suggest faurther implications for designing interactive systems that can support improved remote communication by seamlessly connecting IM and voice call conversations for small intimate groups.

Being a little more careful about the sound that people produce is difficult in shared houses because individuals can generate several unintended living noises and sounds. We designed Tunee to help each housemate better understand the others’ context and desired noise-level. It is an interactive speaker that allows people to share noise-level preferences through the position change of nodes. Our three-week in-field study with four groups of participants revealed that expressing noise-level preference through nodes reduced the burden of verbally delivering issues about the trivial noises of everyday life, and the intentions of the lowered preference were referred to and deemed significant. We also identified how participants figured out what behavior was acceptable for others according to each noise-level. Our findings imply considerations in designing interfaces to support coordinating behaviors and awareness of social contexts in shared spaces.

Although archiving daily moods in a diary is a common behavior, reflection is difficult because of the pressure brought about by continuous self-tracking of personal moods. In this paper, we developed Lumino, a standalone device that enables users to log their daily moods with colored lights and switch mode to show the log by physically sliding a circular lighting plate. The results of our three-week in-field study with six participants revealed that Lumino helped users encounter emotional archives as it separated reflective experiences from daily life activities. Moreover, Lumino helped prevent deep reflection on negative emotions and maintained privacy through abstract color expression. We also found user's various trials to control emotion reflections in their own usage patterns. We propose considerations for augmenting daily mood recording experiences combined with existing diary practices and further implications for designing how to support positively the negative reflections in everyday spaces.

Abstract We designed and implemented Musée to capture the novel experience of interpreting cover versions of music, which contain both familiar and unfamiliar musical components and are curated based on the user’s music-streaming history data. Musée is a tangible music player that enables users to explore and listen to professional or amateur covers of songs (via YouTube) in two categories: covers of songs from users’ most-liked artists and covers of users’ most-played songs. To investigate its potential value in situ, we conducted field trials of Musée in four households for 1 month. Findings showed that unfamiliar musical elements in cover music provided a sense of ‘freshness’ to past songs and helped the listener appreciate over-consumed music in new ways. In addition, restricting detailed information about cover songs that were playing helped users focus on the sound, thus priming them to infer and reflect on the original song and their memories associated with it. Our findings point to new insights for the design of interfaces that use historical personal data to expand users’ experience beyond solely revisiting prior tastes.

Although audiobooks are increasingly being used, people tend to perceive audiobook experiences as 'not real reading' due to its intangibility and ephemerality. In this paper, we developed ADIO, a device augmenting audiobook experience through representing personal listening state in the form of an interactive physical bookshelf. ADIO displays a user's listening progress through a pendant's changing length and the user's digital audiobook archive titles. The result of our four-week in-field study with six participants revealed that ADIO provided proof of the user's listening-to, which brought a sense of reading and gave a trigger for recalling the listened-to audiobook content. Additionally, audiobooks' improved visibility reminded participants to listen to them, and ADIO's physical interaction allowed participants to form personal patterns for listening to audiobooks. Our findings proposed new methods for augmenting the audiobook listening experience at three stages and further implications for designing physical curation on users’ digital archives.

We introduce DayClo, an interactive clock visualizing schedule data for supporting users to reflect and self-track themselves in their daily lives. DayClo is designed by applying the form and time representation method of analog clocks. It shows the user's upcoming schedules through the sequential movement of two clock hands with hidden LEDs and a display. We deployed DayClo in eight participants' working spaces for a month to explore how the design and its interaction could support their reflections on their scheduling practices. The findings revealed that DayClo supported users' casual access to the schedule data and motivated self-tracking of their plans. Moreover, the moving clock hands revealed the empty time of their schedules and helped to draw new plans for their implicit goal. Our findings suggest new opportunities for designing everyday objects as a medium of delivering and fostering spontaneous interaction with personal data for self-reflection.

We introduce Bookly, an interactive artifact that physically represents the accumulated time of users' reading activity through abstract volumetric changes. Bookly accumulates the time of actions (e.g., picking up and putting down books) that users performed for reading and provides a designated space for the ongoing book being read. The results of our 2-week in-field study with six participants showed that continuous exposure to volumetric changes representing the accumulated time of reading activities helped the users to understand their unsettled reading patterns. Bookly also motivated the users to improve their reading behavior by gradually making reading part of their schedules. Additionally, the definite distinction of the ongoing book improved its visual affordance and accessibility for the users to start reading books. Based on the findings, we confirmed the possibility of making intangible data physical for self-reflection to enhance changes in behaviors that are difficult to perform due to weak motivation.

We introduce Quietto: an interactive timepiece made of molded concrete and milled wood. It shows upcoming daily schedules and the time through the quiet, ambient motions of a clock hand and light through the concrete touch interface. The results of an in-field user observation of 10 participants over 3 days showed the possibilities of using concrete as a unique and attractive material for designing a tangible interface due to its unexpected haptic feeling. We also found that Quietto provides an intuitive and effective representation of its users' daily schedules and can be used as a private, personal device. Through its distinctive design, Quietto can provide a new way of understanding scheduling through its concrete texture and amusing interaction qualities.