Abstract Watching a movie or a football match is still a favorite activity when it comes to spending time with family or friends. TV interaction and movie selection is typically based on using one remote control to perform a selection on a TV user interface. Hence movie or TV channel selection is thus limited to one user who holds the remote control in their hand. Consequently, long decision-making processes, frustration, and the perception of being excluded are part of this experience. This research focuses on opportunities for tangible interfaces to support collaborative movie selection in the living room. Based on an exploratory phase with a variety of design ideas, we designed and evaluated a tangible interface called Sharemote—a concept that provides physical genre-based tokens as a key concept for decision-making to explore group interests and to narrow down possible movies to select. Based on a controlled mixed-subject lab study, we showed significant improvements in the overall user experience of jointly selecting a movie. Moreover, Sharemote was users’ preferred choice of TV interaction.

With the rise of hybrid office work, employees often miss workspace awareness when working remotely at home, causing feelings of isolation and preventing communication. To address this, we propose designing information displays that present office activities to promote workspace awareness for hybrid workers. We focus on creating human-like experiences-enabling users to easily perceive information, feel social presence, and make sense of information in context. Informed by previous CSCW research findings, we identified three key design considerations: social cues as information carriers, processing ambiguity, and ambient delivery. Guided by these considerations, we generated multiple designs and selected three distinct ones for evaluation of such experiences in a lab study, where 24 participants experienced and compared the designs. Our analysis shows that these designs indeed provide situational awareness and social presence. The results also offer insights into optimizing design options for different goals. Further research is needed to explore their integration with interactive features and into daily workflows.

This paper addresses the challenges of promoting awareness among coworkers and teams for hybrid work, thereby promoting informal communication. Derived from the merits of onsite experiences, we intend to design human-like experiences to let information naturally flow into awareness. Through annotated portfolios and documented design space schemas, we filtered a design space comprising three aspects: social cues as information carriers, processing information with ambiguity, and ambient information delivery. All aspects are equipped with actionable options. To assess the effectiveness of our design space, we conducted structured workshops with design researchers. Through thematic analysis of workshop data, we informed our design space with one more aspect: built-in lightweight interactions. This design-space thinking process helped us gain an in-depth understanding of human-like experiences and insights into using our design space for ideation.

The inclusion of IoT in office lighting allows people to have personal lighting control at their workplace. To design lighting control interfaces that fit people's everyday living, we need a better understanding of how people experience lighting interaction in the real world. Still, lighting control is often explored in controlled settings. This work presents a qualitative field study concerning the user experience of two control interfaces for a state-of-the-art lighting system of 400+ luminaires in a real-life office. In ten weeks, 43 people interacted 3937 times. The findings illustrate the effects of using a smartphone for lighting control, how people experience lighting control in shared situations, and issues with automatic system behavior. We define design considerations for interface characteristics, shared control, and hybrid control. The work contributes to making the potential benefits of interactive office lighting a reality.

Most systems that we use in everyday life are shared—because multiple people can interact or because an interaction by one person can affect other people. However, everyday Internet of Things systems are often designed for individual use. Prior research on collaboration technologies (Computer Supported Collaborative Work) has shown that to coordinate system sharing people require awareness of the social context, which interfaces can support by making salient information visible. Although literature exists on how to design for awareness, this can be fragmented and difficult to relate to other application domains. To introduce a broader audience of interaction designers to awareness, we aim to make the available design knowledge more generalizable and operational. With this aim, we construct the Designing for Awareness in Shared Systems framework that gives a structured and comprehensive overview of design considerations for awareness. The framework can stimulate reflection and inform decision-making when designing interactions with shared systems.

Interfaces are commonly designed from the perspective of individual users, even though most of the systems we use in everyday life are in fact shared. We argue that more attention is needed for system sharing, especially because interfaces are known to influence coordination of shared use. In this work, we aim to deepen the understanding of this relation. To do so, we design three interfaces for a shared lighting system that vary in the type of social information they allow people to share with others and in their overall interaction style. We systematically compare longitudinal and real-life use of the interfaces, evaluating (1) people's appraisal of three types of social information and (2) the influence of an interaction style on coordination of shared use. The results disclose relations between the interface and the amount of verbal communication, consideration, and accountability. With this work, we urge the need for interaction designers to consider shared use.

IoT developments make shared systems, such as lighting systems, increasingly connected. From an interaction perspective, this offers opportunities for personal control. Especially for lighting, the benefits of personal control have been underlined by research. However, how to design interfaces that realise these potential benefits is much less investigated. This paper presents a long-term qualitative study in which three interfaces for a shared lighting system are evaluated by 17 people working in an open plan office. The interfaces are designed to vary on a number of characteristics, including the distribution over space, interaction modality, and sequence of interaction. Based on the results, we provide new insights in the impact of interface characteristics on lighting use and experience. We find, i.a., that having an interface on a personal multi-purpose device or on a central interface solely dedicated to lighting, influences whether people make individual or more collective lighting adjustments and decisions.

More and more connected systems are entering the social and shared home environment. Interaction with these systems is often rather individual and based on personal preferences, leading to conflicts in multi-user situations. In this paper, we aim to develop a perspective on how to design for multi-user interaction with connected lighting systems, based on a better understanding of real-life interpersonal lighting conflicts. In order to understand everyday lighting conflicts, including their causes and resolution strategies, we present two studies. First, we observe real-life lighting conflicts between couples living in single-room apartments. Using probes for data gathering followed by dyadic interviews, we identify the role of agreements on use in conflicts and we identify different types of conflicts (preference, activity, and attitude conflicts). Next, we take a more disruptive approach based on technology probes, where we provoke lighting conflicts in family living rooms to observe resolution strategies. We find that people try to avoid conflicts at all costs. If there is a risk that others are negatively affected by an adjustment, people rather not interact with the system at all. Based on these insights, we defined a perspective on designing for multi-user interaction that provides the user with the confidence that interactions are socially accepted. This assurance can be given by presenting the user with information leading to awareness about the acceptance of a lighting change by the other users. We advise on what information can be visualized, based on the three conflict types we observed in the study. The combination of a deeper understanding of conflicts and a perspective on multi-user interface design can serve as a starting point to design better multi-user interfaces for domestic connected systems.

Interfaces of interactive systems for domestic use are usually designed for individual interactions although these interactions influence multiple users. In order to prevent conflicts and unforeseen influences on others we propose to leverage the human ability to take each other into consideration in the interaction. A promising approach for this is found in the social translucence framework, which was originally described by Erickson & Kellogg. In this paper, we investigate how to design multi-user interfaces for domestic interactive systems through two design cases where we focus on the implementation of social translucence constructs (visibility, awareness, and accountability) in the interaction. We use the resulting designs to extract design considerations: interfaces should not prescribe behavior, need to offer sufficient interaction alternatives, and previous settings need to be retrievable. We also identify four steps that can be integrated in any design process to help designers in creating interfaces that support multi-user interaction through social translucence.

Innovations in material, information and communication technology enable the application of efficient light sources and shape-changing techniques in our environment and everyday objects of the future. Based on this trend, we propose Sculpting Light Systems (SLS), which combine shape change with light to provide multi-modal displays of light and shape, and which support the tangible manipulation of light. In order to get a primary understanding of how to design a manipulable SLS that could seamlessly merge into the user's context by means of information decoration and tangible interaction, we discuss a framework and two design issues to explore the design space of SLS. In addition, two design cases are developed to demonstrate our framework and to further investigate the potential and challenges of designing SLS with respect to the design issues.

LED-based lighting systems have introduced radically new possibilities in the area of artificial lighting. Being physically small the LED can be positioned or embedded into luminaires, materials and even the very fabric of a building or environment. Hundreds of LEDs can be used in a single luminaire or space, of which each could have different light output properties. The light switch therefore in many situations will need to be enhanced or fully replaced by intelligent controls and smart environments that are sensitive to the context and responsive to the people in the environment. The focus of this workshop is to explore new ways of interacting with light where lighting is no longer simply an on or off system, but a flexible system capable of creating a large range of functional, decorative and ambient light effects.