Despite its current relevance, there have been few attempts in Human–Computer Interaction to theorize and explore what it implies to design for movement in specific physical places. This paper explores how site-specificity can guide the design of playful public interactive installations. Based on a research in and through design approach, we present a retrospective analysis of a project in which our goal was to design an installation that encouraged playful social physical activity among students at a specific university campus site. The analysis provides insights into the design process and how the resulting installation spurred playful social gameplay. We found that the kinesthetic creativity of the members of the design team was stimulated by enacting future use together through site-specific bodystorming. The evaluation made us aware of the importance of doing large portions of the design in-situ when transforming anonymous spaces into distinctive places for playful social interaction.

The democratic and emancipatory principles underpinning Participatory Design (PD) set PD methodology apart from other user-oriented design methodologies associated with Human-Computer Interaction. In turning PD principles into practice, PD facilitators play a vital role. However, at present, there is a lack of understanding regarding skills relevant to enacting the role. To address this issue, we present the results from an interview study involving fourteen respondents with considerable PD facilitation experience. The analysis of the interviews uncovered six facilitation skills of perceived relevance: openness, patience, empathy, attentiveness, responsiveness, and adaptiveness. The significance of each skill, as expressed by respondents, is accounted for. We further discuss the composition of skills in the derived skill set, possible implications of missing skills, and how the findings complement relevant existing work. Drawing on the findings, the paper offers an empirically based qualitative understanding of what constitutes skillful PD facilitation.

User involvement is widely recognized as best practice in the development of information technology (IT) systems. In large-scale IT projects, the involvement of users and other stakeholder groups is typically in the form of representatives, as opposed to the direct (in-person) participation characteristic for smaller projects. The potential new sharing of power that representative participation entails vis-à-vis direct stakeholder involvement, and the implications of such a shift, are an important discussion in the context of participatory design. This paper extends and adds to previous work on this subject. Drawing on stakeholder interviews conducted as part of a case study of an electronic health record implementation project in Norway, this paper seeks to describe and analyze problems that can arise with representative participation in a large-scale project. Our focus is on an observed decline of interaction between health professionals participating actively in the project and their advisory units consisting of colleagues without a formal project role. The paper describes how the project's structural arrangements might explain this decline. The paper also describes how the participating health professionals' involvement of the advisory units at regular intervals early in the project (broad involvement) was replaced by more ad hoc and competence-oriented approaches (narrow involvement). We further use the organizational structure of democracies as the basis for two analogies, (I) participants-as-political-representatives and (II) participants-as-technocrats. The observed decline in interaction between the participating health professionals and their advisory units can be seen as a transition in role from user representative to technocrat. Generalizing from the case, we suggest that (1) a project's structure strongly affects the possibilities of participating users to consult other users (e.g., non-participating colleagues) about issues concerning the design solution, (2) a project's structure conditions the role of participating users and who, or what, they represent, and (3) representative participation requires rethinking a project's structure.

This paper addresses how facilitation can implicate what, whose and how perspectives and values become embedded in the results from participatory design activities. Inspired by Donald Schön's reflection-on-action theory, an analysis of our facilitator performances in three design activities involving health care stakeholder groups with asymmetric relations has been performed. The analysis highlights the often subtle and unforeseen ways by which facilitator actions influence who "has a say". The results emphasize how continuous introspective analyses and reflections may improve the facilitator's attentiveness to actions that may inadvertently impede the disfavored party. In the long-term, neglect may threaten the integrity of participatory design as a democratic and empowering design approach. The shift towards a practice-perspective on facilitation goes beyond the efforts of the individual practitioner. The cultivation of the reflective facilitator, a concern of relevance for the Human?Computer Interaction and Participatory Design community as a whole, is considered.

How is ethics shaped by the particularities of a design? Through a detailed video analysis, we explore how ethicality is shaped in interaction between a choreographer, a performer and a choir of five drones, performing together on the opera stage. We pinpoint how movements enabled by the human-drone assemblage may limit or liberate artistic expressions vis-à-vis the norms of operatic performance. From a somaesthetics perspective on ethics, we show how the process of crafting rich experiences together with drones can deepen sensory appreciation skills, leading to an increased understanding of underlying somatic drivers and imposed norms. Somatic awareness thereby enables a richer repertoire of movements, expanding the ability to freely choose how to act, and cultivating empathy towards others. This shifts our understanding of ethics in HCI as solely about abstract rules or policies 'out there' to also concern the specifics of how technology informs or dictates movement and experience.

Human-Computer Integration (HInt) is an emerging paradigm in which computational and human systems are closely interwoven. Integrating computers with the human body is not new. however, we believe that with rapid technological advancements, increasing real-world deployments, and growing ethical and societal implications, it is critical to identify an agenda for future research. We present a set of challenges for HInt research, formulated over the course of a five-day workshop consisting of 29 experts who have designed, deployed and studied HInt systems. This agenda aims to guide researchers in a structured way towards a more coordinated and conscientious future of human-computer integration.

The design of wearable, tangible and embedded interactive products requires a focus on bodily/kinesthetic aspects of the user experience, that is, how the product "feels" in use. Although best practice in user-centered design (such as iterative design, prototyping, user testing) also applies for this new type of product, the designer's skill set needs to be supplemented with design methods and practices that utilize bodily intelligence and empathy with the user. We present a framework for categorizing such body-centered design practices based on two dimensions: point-of-view (1st, 2nd, 3rd person) and tense (past, present, future). Inspired by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, Shusterman's work on somaesthetics, and Buber's theories on intersubjectivity, the framework provides a language for talking about different ways designers and co-designers can utilize their body as a design resource. The intention is not to be prescriptive on method, but to provide guidance during planning, execution and analysis.

In 2001, Paul Dourish proposed the term embodied interaction to describe a new paradigm for interaction design that focuses on the physical, bodily, and social aspects of our interaction with digital technology. Dourish used Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception as the theoretical basis for his discussion of the bodily nature of embodied interaction. This article extends Dourish's work to introduce the human-computer interaction community to ideas related to Merleau-Ponty's concept of the lived body. It also provides a detailed analysis of two related topics: (1) embodied perception: the active and embodied nature of perception, including the body's ability to extent its sensory apparatus through digital technology; and (2) kinaesthetic creativity: the body's ability to relate in a direct and creative fashion with the “feel” dimension of interactive products during the design process.

In this paper we explore how having cancer and receiving therapy influences upon patients' ability to use an online healthcare system. The motivation is that no empirically based design guidelines are available concerning this user group. Ignoring possible effects of illness and therapy can result in systems with poor usability and user acceptance. A case-control usability test with 14 cancer patients and 14 matched controls revealed that the cancer patients experienced significantly more difficulties compared with the healthy controls using a web-based online healthcare system. We conclude that designers of online healthcare systems need to take into consideration the unique challenges of being ill and/or using medication.

Controlled laboratory-based usability assessments of mobile information and communications technologies (ICT) for hospitals have been conducted. As part of these assessments, clinicians have acted out mobile work scenarios and used the systems to solve related tasks. The evaluations show that relevant usability issues go beyond those of graphical user interfaces. Many of these usability issues only show up when the real-world context of use is replicated in the laboratory to a high degree of fidelity. The complexity of the context of use for mobile ICT in hospitals has motivated us to explore training simulation fidelity theories. Based on a review of the training simulation literature, a set of fidelity dimensions through which training simulations are often adjusted to meet specific goals are identified. It is argued that the same mechanisms can be used in usability assessments of mobile ICT for hospitals. Our argument is substantiated by using the identified set of fidelity dimensions in a retrospective analysis of two usability assessments. The analysis explains how the configuration of fidelity dimensions, each reflecting various degrees of realism vis-à-vis the actual performance context, contributed to the identification of relevant usability issues.

This paper sums up lessons learned from a sequence of cooperative design workshops where end users were enabled to design mobile systems through scenario building, role playing, and low-fidelity prototyping. We present a resulting fixed workshop structure with well-chosen constraints that allows for end users to explore and design new technology and work practices. In these workshops, the systems developers get input to design from observing how users stage and act out current and future use scenarios and improvise new technology to fit their needs. A theoretical framework is presented to explain the creative processes involved and the workshop as a user-centered design method. Our findings encourage us to recommend the presented workshop structure for design projects involving mobility and computer-mediated communication, in particular project where the future use of the resulting products and services also needs to be designed.

Context-aware systems are currently to a large extent designed from a systems perspective. Research on these technologies has so far mostly been focused on exploring what can be built and less on how it will show up in people's lives. The existing theory and practice in human-computer interaction has mainly evolved from work on graphical user interfaces, and additional theory is required to enable user-centered design of context-aware systems. Interaction with such systems is to a larger extent physical, and an appropriate theory consequently needs to account for the user's bodily nature. We have found the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty to be a good starting point for the development of such theory. With its first-person focus on the lived body and its relation to the environment, it provides a conceptual framework well suited for understanding context-aware systems from the user's perspective. The perspective moves the focus from seeing a context-aware system as an artifact "sensing" information, to seeing it as an interactive system with a physical user interface. This makes the distinction between foreground and background interaction a property not of the system, but of the situation. A consequence of this philosophical standpoint is that context can never be a property of the world, but that context rather is the horizon within which the user makes sense of the world. The phenomenological perspective enables a systematic exploration of the design space for context-aware systems-as they appear to the user. It further enables an analysis of the requirements for a seamless integration between screen-based and context-aware systems. The essay ends by pointing to the need for making the technology available in a form that can be easily utilized by interaction designers.