Smart, pervasive Augmented Reality (AR) glasses are making their way out of the research labs. Many big tech companies are working on developing these promising next-generation interaction devices, and apps and services around them. When integrated with emerging face recognition technologies (FRT), Pervasive AR glasses can become powerful everyday tools. However, little is known about their acceptance, perceptual, and ethical ramifications. To address this, we developed a Pervasive AR technology probe with functional FRT and conducted an empirical study with 54 participants in a public environment. We collected interview data regarding perceived ethics about combining Pervasive AR with FRT. We developed five dominant themes informing the potential concerns and characteristics. Based on those findings, we propose to develop future Pervasive AR systems around principles of symmetry and consent—what we call a Kantian approach. We hope that our research will inform the design and development of near-future smart glasses.

Pervasive Augmented Reality, as a context-aware and ubiquitous technology, captures and scans a user's environment to create and tailor augmentations for the user. We assume that Pervasive AR will not only be commonplace in recognising the general environment of a user but also include the identification of people in its context by way of face recognition. While there is a body of research addressing privacy issues with Pervasive AR technology and face recognition individually, less is known about the implications of the asymmetry of information availability and agency on users' perceptions, acceptability, and ethical concerns. In addition, little is known about potential social behaviour changes due to those aspects. We exposed 50 participants to a purpose-developed Pervasive AR technology probe and explored the ethical and social implications of the experience. Our findings show that Pervasive AR, in combination with face recognition and asymmetric information delivery, can lead to skewed social interactions with consequences that affect users' sense of control, agency, and identity. Furthermore, this exploration raises questions about technology acceptability in general when bringing together emerging technologies, like AR and face recognition, as queried here.

In this work we present our system for teaching practical geology field skills through a combination of 360° video, photogrammetry, and virtual content. The system was evaluated with first- and second-year undergraduate geoscience students to determine if it was effective in teaching practical skills that could be transferred to the real world. Second-year students who had performed the task before saw a significant improvement in their abilities, however this improvement was absent in the first-year students, suggesting the tool may be more effective for revision rather than first-time learning. We discuss these findings and their implications for future virtual training tools, as well as the challenges in developing and deploying such systems in a university environment.

For social justice-oriented design, pluralistic participatory practices are recognised as important. This paper explores Socially Engaged Art (SEA) as one such practice, which uses dialogical inquiry to address social justice issues. We describe a case study of SEA-informed digital storytelling workshops in a rurban community in Ireland. The workshops aimed to support diverse adolescent participants in identifying and critiquing place-based social issues with a view to imagining alternative and inclusive futures. SEA was instrumental in uncovering contradictory and hidden experiences of community life. We propose incorporating SEA into design processes to: i) challenge assumptions around identity and belonging; ii) recognise diverse experiences; and iii) breakdown social-engagement barriers. As we ask questions on what design is for, who should design, and why design matters, SEA can centre marginalised experiences, support polyvocal participation and help develop participant agency to work towards more equitable futures in rapidly changing environments.

The integration of questionnaires into virtual reality experiences has recently been proposed as a way to reduce the potential biases introduced through the negative effects of leaving VR, however there has been little attention paid to how qualitative interviews could similarly be integrated into the virtual world for the purposes of user evaluation. In this paper we explore how conducting interviews within the virtual environment may affect the outcome of the evaluation and the relationship between participant and interviewer, and how this may differ with and without visual representation of the interviewer through use of an avatar. We conclude that in-VR interviews are a valid and promising method of data collection for user evaluation with similar data quality to in-person interviews, but that the interviewer should have a visual presence in the environment to maintain their relationship with the participant and the perceived realism of the environment.

Extended Reality (XR) offers the potential to transform the passenger experience by allowing users to inhabit varied virtual spaces for entertainment, work or social interaction, whilst escaping the constrained transit environment. XR allows remote collaborators to feel like they are together and enables them to perform complex 3D tasks. However, the social and physical constraints of the passenger space pose unique challenges to productive and socially acceptable collaboration. Using a collaborative VR puzzle task, we examined the effects of five different f-formations of collaborator placement and orientation in an interactive workspace on social presence, task workload, and implications for social acceptability. Our quantitative and qualitative results showed that face-to-face formations were preferred for tasks with a high need for verbal communication but may lead to social collisions, such as inadvertently staring at a neighbouring passenger, or physical intrusions, such as gesturing in another passenger’s personal space. More restrictive f-formations, however, were preferred for passenger use as they caused fewer intrusions on other passengers’ visual and physical space.

Abstract The rapidly expanding rural community (often called rurban) is a new place for CSCW with unique sociogeographic characteristics that give rise to the need for adapted participatory practices. Socially Engaged Art (SEA) offers pluralistic and critical approaches to participative rurban CSCW to meet this need. This paper provides a case study of SEA-informed CSCW in an Irish rurban community. An online digital art summer school was delivered to young residents of Northrock using freely available digital collaboration and creation tools. Young people in rurban communities are navigating personal, social and political issues in a complex and evolving environment. In this summer school, SEA was applied to explore these issues through the creation and sharing of digital art on participant experiences and hopes for the future. The summer school hoped to promote critical thinking, confrontational dialogue and greater mutual understanding. We found that rapid creation and critique of a range of digital art expressions of social issues accessed nuanced and contradictory experiences, bringing them into dialogue with each other while supporting mutual understanding and new perspectives on rurban place and identity as they evolve. We propose integrating SEA into CSCW with young people in liminal and transitional communities such as the rurban to explore complex lived experiences in pursuit of more equitable futures and sustainable community expansion. We also draw attention to the usefulness of readily available digital and online tools in supporting CSCW in creative workshop situations.

Though virtual reality has repeatedly seen usability improvements through higher fidelity headsets, interacting with small objects has remained an issue due to a reduction in visual acuity. Given the current uptake of virtual reality platforms and the range of real world applications that they may be used for, it is worth considering how such interactions can be accounted for. We propose three techniques for improving the usability of small objects in virtual environments: i) expanding them in place, ii) showing a zoomed-in twin above the original object, and iii) showing a large readout of the object's current state. We conducted a study comparing each technique's usability, induced presence, and effect on short-term knowledge retention in a VR training scenario that simulated the common geoscience exercise of measuring strike and dip. Participant feedback highlighted the need for this research, however simply scaling the area of interest may not be enough to improve the usability of information-bearing objects, while displaying this information in large text format can make tasks faster to complete at the cost of reducing the user's ability to transfer knowledge they've learned to the real world. We discuss these results and their implications for the design of future virtual reality experiences.

We present TeleFest, a novel system for live-streaming mixed reality 360° videos to online streaming services. TeleFest allows a producer to control multiple cameras in real time, providing viewers with different locations for experiencing the concert, and an intermediate software stack allows virtual content to be overlaid with coherent illumination that matches the real-world footage. TeleFest was evaluated by livestreaming a concert to almost 2,000 online viewers, allowing them to watch the performance from the crowd, the stage, or via a catered experience controlled by a producer in real time that included camera switching and augmented content. The results of an online survey completed by virtual and physical attendees of the festival are presented, showing positive feedback for our setup and suggesting that the addition of virtual and immersive content to live events could lead to a more enjoyable experience for viewers.

As a result of urban concentration, colonisation, increased physical distance from tribal homelands, and globalisation, many indigenous people, including Māori, are seeking digital solutions to connect to their culture and identity. Through co-design, close collaboration with our indigenous partners, and careful consideration of cultural context, we show that mixed reality experiences can be an effective mechanism for the growing diaspora of Māori to access and experience their language, genealogy, families, histories and knowledge. Inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews highlights the importance of cultural values and context in this experience, and confirms that this approach can support connections to community and culture. Our work is deeply embedded in a particular indigenous group’s context and culture, but we believe that it holds important lessons that can generalise to other groups. In particular, collaborative co-design and recognition of cultural values throughout the project are essential for producing experiences that meet the needs of specific communities, and that reflect and respect their culture and worldview.

Passengers spend considerable periods of time in shared transit spaces, relying on smartphones and laptops for work. However, these displays are limited in size and ergonomics compared to typical multi-monitor setups used in the office, impairing productivity. Augmented Reality (AR) headsets could provide large, flexible virtual workspaces during travel, enabling passengers to work more efficiently. This paper investigates the factors affecting how passengers choose to layout virtual displays in car, train, subway and plane environments, studying the affordances of each mode of transport and the presence of others. Results from our experiment showed: significant usage of the physical environment to align displays; strong social effects meant avoiding placing displays over other passengers or their belongings; and use of displays for shielding oneself from others. Our findings show the unique challenges posed by the mode of transport and presence of others on the use of AR for mobile productivity in the future.

Recent HCI scholarship has critiqued anthropocentrism in design as contributing to the ecological crisis. The current paper contributes theoretically and empirically to this area, adopting the lens of Socio-Ecological Relations, inspired by Environmental History and STS. We argue that a socio-ecological lens can offer practical tools to HCI and Interaction Design to overcome the separation between humanity and nature-as-a-resource. For this reason, our unit of analysis is humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity, and we show how this double internality becomes visible using an historical and geographical approach in the design process. Methodologically, using Situational Analysis, we analyse an Action Research project that introduced a digital platform for community radio in rural contexts. We find that Socio-Ecological Relations, performed in specific places, shape the design process and are themselves transformed by becoming part of it. We provide a set of sensitivities for operationalizing this approach for design researchers.

Head-Mounted Virtual reality (VR) systems provide full-immersive experiences to users and completely isolate them from the outside world, placing them in unsafe situations. Existing research proposed different alert-based solutions to address this. Our work builds on these studies on notification systems for VR environments from a different perspective. We focus on: (i) exploring alert systems to notify VR users about non-immersed bystanders' in socially related, non-critical interaction contexts; (ii) understanding how best to provide awareness of non-immersed bystanders while maintaining presence and immersion within the Virtual Environment(VE). To this end, we developed single and combined alert cues - leveraging proxemics, perception channels, and push/pull approaches and evaluated those via two user studies. Our findings indicate a strong preference towards maintaining immersion and combining audio and visual cues, push and pull notification techniques that evolve dynamically based on proximity.

This article contributes to research that aims to better understand and describe the rural context for rural computing. We argue that the particularities of rurality are heightened by the experience of ‘islandness’. We report on our experiences of engaging on one small island as islanders established community radio using a novel platform. Data comes from 12 semi-structured interviews with community members and ethnographic field notes assembled through eight researcher visits to the island. Transcripts and notes were analysed using thematic analysis. We discuss how rural islandness as a socio-cultural lens influenced technology appropriation and factors to support participation. We explore the elements of rural islandness that can be used as an analytic tool for rural HCI and HCI more broadly, through three main contributions of rural islandness that we believe have not yet been sufficiently explored in HCI. These are (1) separateness, (2) pushing things ahead, and (3) publics and rural pluralities.

There is a growing body of HCI work that seeks to understand and enhance the lived experience of people with dementia. The majority of this work involves researchers working alongside people with dementia and their carers, focused on the design project outcomes. In order to enrich the social context of this work, we explore broadening participation to include student volunteers. To encourage mutually engaging experiences in this design context, careful consideration of how to support both students and people with dementia is needed. In this paper, we present two case- studies of co-design projects between students and people with dementia. Our findings detail the use of design methods to reconfigure the role of the residents in care contexts and the students learning process. We discuss the project learning outcomes as well as practical and ethical considerations to support the use of design methods to support mutual engagement in sensitive contexts.

Rural communities often lack platforms to support civic engagement and local deliberation. Community radio is intended to facilitate such functions, yet, radio technologies can be expensive and complex to use. To tackle this challenge, low-barrier radio technologies are becoming available. We argue that technology to support civic engagement and local deliberation are important, and design of such platforms must take into consideration specific community needs. We contribute by exploring the needs of three rural European communities. Findings indicate that communities are now distributed beyond place. Platforms for deliberation must include both hyper-local and geographically dispersed populations. Rural values of accountability, reliability and maintaining social harmony are important design considerations. Community radio platforms should support geographically distributed community connections, sharing of health and emergency information, preservation of heritage and as a space for advocacy and civic action.

Conversational agents promise conversational interaction but fail to deliver. Efforts often emulate functional rules from human speech, without considering key characteristics that conversation must encapsulate. Given its potential in supporting long-term human-agent relationships, it is paramount that HCI focuses efforts on delivering this promise. We aim to understand what people value in conversation and how this should manifest in agents. Findings from a series of semi-structured interviews show people make a clear dichotomy between social and functional roles of conversation, emphasising the long-term dynamics of bond and trust along with the importance of context and relationship stage in the types of conversations they have. People fundamentally questioned the need for bond and common ground in agent communication, shifting to more utilitarian definitions of conversational qualities. Drawing on these findings we discuss key challenges for conversational agent design, most notably the need to redefine the design parameters for conversational agent interaction.

While there have been considerable developments in designing for dementia within HCI, there is still a lack of empirical understanding of the experience of people with advanced dementia and the ways in which design can support and enrich their lives. In this paper, we present our findings from a long-term ethnographic study, which aimed to gain an understanding of their lived experience and inform design practices for and with people with advanced dementia in residential care. We present our findings using the social theory of recognition as an analytic lens to account for recognition in practice and its challenges in care and research. We discuss how we, as the HCI community, can pragmatically engage with people with advanced dementia and propose a set of considerations for those who wish to design for and with the values of recognition theory to promote collaboration, agency and social identity in advanced dementia care.

Whereas there have been significant improvements in the quality of care provided for people with dementia, limited attention to the importance for people with dementia being enabled to make positive social contributions within care home contexts can restrict their sense of agency. In this paper we describe the design and deployment of 'Printer Pals' a receipt-based print media device, which encourages social contribution and agency within a care home environment. The design followed a two-year ethnography, from which the need for highlighting participation and supporting agency for residents within the care home became clear. The residents use of Printer Pals mediated participation in a number of different ways, such as engaging with the technology itself, offering shared experiences and participating in co-constructive and meaningful ways, each of which is discussed. We conclude with a series of design consideration to support agentic and caring interactions through inclusive design practices.

Focusing on the person with advanced dementia as a social being presents a new opportunity for Experience-Centered Design (ECD), opening design to appreciate the agency and intentional actions of the person with advanced dementia. If Human-Computer Interaction is to shift from the predominantly assistive approach to a focus on experience, a theoretical framing that emphasizes the relational nature of selfhood is needed. In this article, we present Recognition Theory—a social theory based on an inter-subjectivist account of the struggle for recognition—to extend ECD approaches for advanced dementia. Focusing on people with advanced dementia, we examine recognition as a social and ethical perspective for establishing and maintaining self. We present a framework for design based on research with people with advanced dementia, experience-centered engagement and social identity, that will support designers to craft opportunities for mutual recognition in the design process and the practice of making.

Experience-Centred Design (ECD) has been applied in numerous HCI projects to call attention to the particular and dialogical nature of people's experiences with technology. In this paper, we report on ECD within the context of publicly-funded, long-stay residential dementia care, where the approach helped to highlight aspects of participants' felt experience, and informed sensitive and meaningful design responses. This study contributes an extended understanding of the quality of experience and the means of making sense in dementia, as well as unpicking the potential of ECD to support enriched experience and contextual meaning-making for people with dementia. Finally, we delineate what it is about Experience-Centred Design that differentiates the approach from other often-used approaches in designing in dementia contexts: 1) explorative thinking, 2) working within 'cuttings-out of time and space', 3) careful yet expressive methodology and documentation, and 4) working together to imagine futures. We end with considerations of how the contributions of this research may extend to other experience-centred projects in challenging settings.

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) are widely available on devices such as smartphones. However, most people do not use them regularly. Previous research has studied the experiences of frequent IPA users. Using qualitative methods we explore the experience of infrequent users: people who have tried IPAs, but choose not to use them regularly. Unsurprisingly infrequent users share some of the experiences of frequent users, e.g. frustration at limitations on fully hands-free interaction. Significant points of contrast and previously unidentified concerns also emerge. Cultural norms and social embarrassment take on added significance for infrequent users. Humanness of IPAs sparked comparisons with human assistants, juxtaposing their limitations. Most importantly, significant concerns emerged around privacy, monetization, data permanency and transparency. Drawing on these findings we discuss key challenges, including: designing for interruptability; reconsideration of the human metaphor; issues of trust and data ownership. Addressing these challenges may lead to more widespread IPA use.

In the context of distance (online) learning programs, the current paper focuses on two specific goals. First, we outline how personalization based on learning analytics has been implemented in online programs offered by traditional universities, but also providers of MOOCs and virtual institutions. However, this established approach is not without its limitations. Second, we introduce two alternate concepts that may support personalization based on work around readability indices and job crafting. These approaches may also help to address some of the limitations of learning analytics. The emphasis is on how personalization may support the development of individual learning paths that would provide means for both self-pacing and co-construction of the experience. The paper concludes with a review of facilitating and challenging factors for program leaders, online technical staff and designers working in open educational contexts.

This paper presents an ethnographic study exploring the role of props and music in dementia care in order to engage participants and inform design. Our findings extend current understandings of participation to reveal that a more nuanced view of participation is required when designing in the dementia context. Our work suggests that participation in music sessions for people with dementia is about touch and intimacy, connection via movement, shifting roles, materiality and using props to disengage. We discuss these themes, their implications for Experience-Centered Design and offer a set of future directions in designing for and with people with dementia that underpin the participation of people with dementia in a meaningful and enriching way.

Our natural environment is complex and sensitive, and is home to a number of species on the verge of extinction. Surveying is one approach to their preservation, and can be supported by technology. This paper presents the deployment of a smartphone-based citizen science biodiversity application. Our findings from interviews with members of the biodiversity community revealed a tension between the technology and their established working practices. From our experience, we present a series of general guidelines for those designing citizen science apps.

Energy systems researchers are proposing a broad range of future "smart" energy infrastructures to promote more efficient management of energy resources. This paper considers how consumers might relate to these future smart grids within the UK. To address this challenge we exploited a combination of demonstration and animated sketches to convey the nature of a future smart energy infrastructure based on software agents. Users' reactions suggested that although they felt an obligation to engage with energy issues, they were principally disinterested. Users showed a considerable lack of trust in energy companies raising a dilemma of design. While users might welcome agents to help in engaging with complex energy infrastructures, they had little faith in those that might provide them. This suggests the need to consider how to design software agents to enhance trust in these socio-economic settings.

We present a system and study of personalized energy-related recommendation. AgentSwitch utilizes electricity usage data collected from users' households over a period of time to realize a range of smart energy-related recommendations on energy tariffs, load detection and usage shifting. The web service is driven by a third party real-time energy tariff API (uSwitch), an energy data store, a set of algorithms for usage prediction, and appliance-level load disaggregation. We present the system design and user evaluation consisting of interviews and interface walkthroughs. We recruited participants from a previous study during which three months of their household's energy use was recorded to evaluate personalized recommendations in AgentSwitch. Our contributions are a) a systems architecture for personalized energy services; and b) findings from the evaluation that reveal challenges in designing energy-related recommender systems. In response to the challenges we formulate design recommendations to mitigate barriers to switching tariffs, to incentivize load shifting, and to automate energy management.

The assumed role of humans as controllers and instructors of machines is changing. As systems become more complex and incomprehensible to humans, it will be increasingly necessary for us to place confidence in intelligent interfaces and follow their instructions and recommendations. This type of relationship becomes particularly intricate when we consider significant numbers of humans and agents working together in collectives. While instruction-based interfaces and agents already exist, our understanding of them within the field of Human-Computer Interaction is still limited.

There are few conceptual tools available to analyse physical spaces in terms of their support for social interactions and their potential for technological augmentation. In this paper, we describe how we used Adam Kendon's characterisation of the F-formation system of spatial organisation as a conceptual lens to analyse the social interactions between visitors and staff in a tourist information centre. We describe how the physical structures in the space encouraged and discouraged particular kinds of interactions and discuss how F-formations might be used to think about augmenting physical spaces.

A number of novel technology-rich learning spaces have been developed over the last few years in UK. Many claims have been made in terms of how they can support and enhance learning, collaboration, community participation, and creativity. This line of research is investigating whether such learning spaces are living up to such claims. The approach is ethnographic, a number of field studies have been conducted examining how people use the spaces in practice. Findings so far have shown that that the spaces are not used in the way anticipated and that flexibility, a sense of ownership and control are key issues.

Musical harmony is considered to be one of the most abstract and technically difficult parts of music. It is generally taught formally via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is represented using an existing interactive desktop tool, Harmony Space, a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges. This focuses not on abstract concepts, but on concrete locations, objects, areas and trajectories.