Group snacking contexts are typically unstructured and frequently associated with the consumption of snack product FMCGs (fast-moving consumer goods). Snacks are generally low value, shared and potentially over consumed. To explore the potential of digital interventions to playfully elevate the value of these snacks, we created a sharing snack bowl technology probe embedding simple game mechanics to track individual turns for taking a snack. This paper presents both in-lab and home studies where participants used the snack bowl whilst simultaneously playing a quiz card game. Findings from thematic analysis revealed how the snack bowl elicited togetherness, reflection, and social pressure whilst also disrupting group snacking habits. Our contributions include implications for reconfiguring snacking and enhancing the value of low-cost FMCGs through ludic design elements, and augmenting everyday tangible objects for use in group settings.

We present the design of the Memory Machine (MeMa), a technology probe that can store, contextualise, and document media to represent memories. We accumulate vast physical and digital possessions throughout our lives, making it difficult to distinguish value in amassed images, albums, videos, mementos, and music. One option we wanted to explore via MeMa was to frame personal memories as a gift, in turn providing a way to revisit, share, and collate personal archives. We deployed MeMa into participants’ homes and tasked them to create a digital gift involving an autobiographical memory. Through qualitative methods we uncovered the experience of twelve gift-givers. We found that the framing as a gift brought meaning to a collection of media, promoting reflection and emotional reminiscence in participants. Our contributions include design implications involving the relationship between emotions, technology, and gifting.

This study focuses on the hybrid gifting model, where both physical and digital objects combine to create a single gift. For this in-the-world study, we turn to nostalgic emotions. We aimed to uncover if hybrid gifting can facilitate nostalgic experiences through repurposed digital media. In this case, we used a physical chocolate box and a QR code, that when scanned presented nostalgic images and text. Findings from gift exchanges and eighteen semi-structured interviews with givers and receivers are presented through thematic analysis. We reveal the impact on exchanges when nostalgia is evoked, and outline the roles of people, emotions, and objects. The contribution of this work is an understanding of repurposing our growing digital archives to frame nostalgic memories as gifts.

This workshop uses the outputs of a two-year Research through Design project as a springboard for bringing together a community of researchers interested in Hybrid Gifting. We have discovered that the many creative and socio-psychological processes involved in choosing or making a gift inform a great deal about interactions with common digital technologies, especially when they are used to make a hybrid gift with both physical and digital components. This workshop will be a temporally extended opportunity to experience the full cycle of giving and receiving gifts, whether you use our outputs or prototypes or your own ideas, artworks, or design fictions. Let’s take this opportunity to use our research to celebrate and care for each other, and perhaps envision new ways of celebrating and caring for others.

Gifting is socially and economically important. Studies of gifting physical objects have revealed motivations, values, and the tensions between them, while HCI research has revealed weaknesses of digital gifting and explored possibilities of hybrid gifting. We report an “in the wild” study of a hybrid chocolate gift deployed as a commercial product. Interviews reveal the experiences of receivers and givers, as well as the producer's friction points and tangible benefits. We reveal how in hybrid gifts the digital elevates the physical while the physical grounds the digital. We discuss how hybrid gifts bridge the tension between receiver-preference and relationship-signalling motivations, the need to further strengthen the exchange and reveal stages of hybrid gifting, and to manage the privacy of sensitive personal messages. We propose to extend the concept of hybrid wrapping to include a finer-grained interleaving of digital into complex packaging and multi-layered wrappings to create more holistic gifting experiences.