The seamless transition of control between drivers and autonomous systems remains a critical challenge in automated driving, affecting both safety outcomes and overall user experience. To address this challenge, our study examines the effectiveness of two distinct haptic feedback approaches—pneumatic and vibrotactile—when implemented as intelligent interface components for takeover requests (TORs) during these transition periods. We specifically investigate how these haptic modalities can effectively signal drivers when human intervention is required, facilitating smoother control transitions from automated to manual driving. We designed a comprehensive experimental setup integrating these haptic modalities with audio and visual cues and evaluated their performance across nine interaction tasks to understand how multi-modal feedback influences driver responsiveness during takeover scenarios. Our findings reveal that multi-modal approaches incorporating either pneumatic or vibrotactile feedback, combined with standard visual cues, substantially outperform audio-only alerts in both response time and accuracy metrics for takeover requests (TORs). Notably, pneumatic feedback offered more natural sensation and smoother transitions than vibrotactile feedback, with pneumatic systems excelling in comfort while vibrotactile feedback better serves urgent takeovers. This first systematic comparison provides valuable insights for developing interfaces that balance effectiveness with comfort in human-machine systems.

Smartphones’ screens are touch-sensitive and offer rich visual output capabilities, but do not allow users to control a wide range of pressure input nor provide rich pressure sensations. We propose In-Flat, an input/output pressure-sensitive overlay for smartphones. In-Flat consists of a transparent inflatable skin-like silicon layer that can be placed on the top or the back of a smartphone. As an output device, In-Flat offers tangible affordances and dynamic pressure feedback coupled with visual display. As an input device, In-Flat enables users to continuously perform a wide range of input gestures, notably press and pinch-and-pull gestures. Thus, In-Flat can be used to finely manipulate visual objects in mobile interaction or mediate interpersonal touch communications. In contrast to previous studies that mostly focus on press, we investigated the performance of pinch-and-pull and compared it with press. Our experiment (N=12) showed that participants could perform pinch-and-pull (83.8%) as well as press (84.7%), but felt having more control when performing pinch-and-pull. We explored the use of In-Flat to enable multimodal interaction that couples visual display and touch input/output. Participants appreciated this coupling as well as the touch sensation supplied by the In-Flat device.

Social distancing may force people to restrict social touch practices. Our survey (N=136) highlighted substantial social touch breakdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic for semi-intimate relationships (e.g., friends, colleagues), with handshakes being the most reduced, and frustrations at having to re-establish social touch habits. We then designed SansTouch, a multi-modal hand sleeve used together along with a smartphone to enable mediated hand-to-hand interactions such as handshakes or holding hands. To invoke the mediated touch, users synchronously mimic the hand position as in real life while holding SansTouch. Users can feel the touch sensation in real time without touching. Participants from our observational study (N=12) quickly adopted the hand-to-hand interactions of SansTouch for exchanging greetings face-to-face with colleagues and reported stronger preferences towards using SansTouch as opposed to mid-air gestures (e.g., waving). We discuss design implications, including the trade-offs of multi-modality for touch devices in face-to-face communication.

As one of the most important non-verbal communication channel, touch plays an essential role in interpersonal affective communication. Although some researchers have started exploring the possibility of using wearable devices for conveying emotional information, most of the existing devices still lack the capability to support affective and dynamic touch in interaction. In this paper, we explore the effect of dynamic visual cues on the emotional perception of vibrotactile signals. For this purpose, we developed VisualTouch, a haptic sleeve consisting of a haptic layer and a visual layer. We hypothesized that visual cues would enhance the interpretation of tactile cues when both types of cues are congruent. We first carried out an experiment and selected 4 stimuli producing substantially different responses. Based on that, a second experiment was conducted with 12 participants rating the valence and arousal of 36 stimuli using SAM scales.

This special issue presents highlights from ECCE 2018, the 30th European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics, which is the annual event of the European Association of Cognitive Ergonomics (EACE). EC...

In this article, we investigate methods for suggesting the interactivity of online visualizations embedded with text. We first assess the need for such methods by conducting three initial experiments on Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We then present a design space for Suggested Interactivity (i. e., visual cues used as perceived affordances-SI), based on a survey of 382 HTML5 and visualization websites. Finally, we assess the effectiveness of three SI cues we designed for suggesting the interactivity of bar charts embedded with text. Our results show that only one cue (SI3) was successful in inciting participants to interact with the visualizations, and we hypothesize this is because this particular cue provided feedforward.

We present the results of three web-based field experiments, in which we evaluate the impact of using initial narrative visualization techniques and storytelling on user-engagement with exploratory information visualizations. We conducted these experiments on a popular news and opinion outlet, and on a popular visualization gallery website. While data-journalism exposes visualizations to a large public, we do not know how effectively this public makes sense of interactive graphics, and in particular if people explore them to gain additional insight to that provided by the journalists. In contrast to our hypotheses, our results indicate that augmenting exploratory visualizations with introductory 'stories' does not seem to increase user-engagement in exploration.

Our research aims at understanding the various forms of participation in Open Source Software (OSS) design, seen as distributed design in online spaces of actions–discussion, implementation, and boundary between these spaces. We propose a methodology—based on situated analyses of a formal design process used in the Python project—to identify the distribution of actual roles (implementation, interactive, group, and design oriented) performed by participants into and between the spaces (defining boundary spaces). This notion of roles is grounded in collaborative design activities performed online by participants. This way, our findings complete the core-periphery model of participation in OSS. Concerning the distribution of roles between spaces, we reveal a map of participation in OSS: The majority of participants are pure discussants, but all participants in the implementation spaces do also act in the discussion space, and few participants act at boundary spaces. Concerning the distribution of roles between participants in the discussion space, we reveal that interactions are structured by a central hub (occupied by key participants) and that, whereas design-oriented roles are spread among all participants, group-oriented roles are performed by one or two participants in the respective spaces and at their boundary. Finally, combination of roles reveals five individual profiles performed by participants. Our approach could be extended to other design situations to explore relationships between forms of participation—in particular, those revealing use-oriented contributions—performance, and quality of the design product. Finally, it could be a basis for specifying tools to monitor and manage community activity for both research issues and support of online community.

This paper is an analysis of online discussions in an Open Source Software (OSS) design community, the Python project. Developers of Python are geographically distributed and work online asynchronously. The objective of our study is to understand and to model the dynamics of the OSS design process that takes place in mailing list exchanges. We develop a method to study distant and asynchronous collaborative design activity based on an analysis of quoting practices. We analyze and visualize three aspects of the online dynamics: social, thematic temporal, and design. We show that roles emerge during discussions according to the involvement and the position of the participants in the discussions and how they influence participation in the design discussions. In our analysis of the thematic temporal dynamics of discussion, we examine how themes of discussion emerge, diverge, and are refined over time. To understand the design dynamics, we perform a content analysis of messages exchanged between developers to reveal how the online discussions reflect the “work flow” of the project: it provides us with a picture of the collaborative design process in the OSS community. These combined results clarify how knowledge and artefacts are elaborated in this epistemic, exploration-oriented, OSS community. Finally, we outline the need to automate of our method to extend our results. The proposed automation could have implications for both researchers and participants in OSS communities.

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement, which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design.

This paper presents an analysis of online discussions in Open Source Software (OSS) design. The objective of our work is to understand and model the dynamics of OSS design that take place in mailing list exchanges. We show how quotation practices can be used to locate design relevant data in discussion archives. OSS developers use quotation as a mechanism to maintain the discursive context. To retrace thematic coherence in the online discussions of a major OSS project, Python, we follow how messages are linked through quotation practices. We compare our quotation-based analysis with a more conventional analysis: a thread-based of the reply-to links between messages. The advantages of a quotation-based analysis over a thread-based analysis are outlined. Our analysis reveals also the links between the social structure and elements in the discussion space and how it shapes influence in the design process.

This paper presents an approach to the study of cognitive activities in collaborative software development. This approach has been developed by a multidisciplinary team made up of software engineers and cognitive psychologists. The basis of this approach is to improve our understanding of software development by observing professionals at work. The goal is to derive lines of conduct or good practices based on observations and analyses of the processes that are naturally used by software engineers. The strategy involved is derived from a standard approach in cognitive science. It is based on the videotaping of the activities of software engineers, transcription of the videos, coding of the transcription, defining categories from the coded episodes and defining cognitive behaviors or dialogs from the categories. This project presents two original contributions that make this approach generic in software engineering. The first contribution is the introduction of a formal hierarchical coding scheme, which will enable comparison of various types of observations. The second is the merging of psychological and statistical analysis approaches to build a cognitive model. The details of this new approach are illustrated with the initial data obtained from the analysis of technical review meetings.

This paper presents a state-of-the-art review of empirical research on object-oriented (OO) design. Many claims about the cognitive benefits of the OO paradigm have been made by its advocates. These claims concern the ease of designing and reusing software at the individual level as well as the benefits of this paradigm at the team level. Since these claims are cognitive in nature, it seems important to assess them empirically. After a brief presentation of the main concepts of the OO paradigm, the claims about the superiority of OO design are outlined. The core of this paper consists of a review of empirical studies of OO design (OOD). We first discuss results concerning OOD by individuals. On the basis of empirical work, we (1) analyse the design activity of novice OO designers, (2) compare OOD with procedural design and (3) discuss a typology of problems relevant for the OO approach. Then we assess the claims about naturalness and ease of OOD. The next part discusses results on OO software reuse. On the basis of empirical work, we (1) compare reuse in the OO versus the procedural paradigm, (2) discuss the potential for OO software reuse and (3) analyse reuse activity in the OO paradigm. Then we assess claims on reusability. The final part reviews empirical work on OOD by teams. We present results on communication, coordination, knowledge dissemination and interactions with clients. Then we assess claims about OOD at the software design team level. In a general conclusion, we discuss the limitations of these studies and give some directions for future research.