We propose Awareness-Attention-Connection (AAC) as a design framework for turning micro-mobility guidance into placemaking-in-motion, balancing narrative engagement with rider safety. Rather than treating e-bike routes as neutral corridors between landmarks, AAC choreographs when riders are gently alerted to a place, when their attention is drawn in, and when deeper connection is invited. This pictorial presents two deployments using audio-first, visually lightweight guidance to surface hidden histories, ecological transformations, and everyday atmospheres along urban and waterfront paths. Key contributions include: (1) a three-stage framework (AAC) with corresponding design strategies for structuring in-motion encounters with place; (2) empirical insights on how riders experience AAC in practice; and (3) a Perceptual Rhythm Model describing how distance, timing, and narrative depth can be co-designed as an experiential rhythm to reframe place impressions for mobility-first interaction design.

Storytelling scaffolds meaning-making within human–nonhuman relationships. While more-than-human design, particularly in the multispecies design, has established storytelling as a productive lens for noticing the world, this work extends this foundation toward active sense-making through The Cat Fiction—a method leveraging generative AI to craft situated stories grounded in daily human–cat interactions. The method orchestrates empathy through an anthropomorphic first-cat narrator and defamiliarization through interplay of reality and fiction. A month-long exploratory study revealed that AI-generated stories evoked affective resonance and curiosity, supporting participants in reframing their relationships with cats through iterative reflection and interpretation. This paper contributes: (1) The Cat Fiction, a method orchestrating empathy and defamiliarization for situated multispecies storytelling; (2) empirical insights on how AI-generated narratives support relational sense-making; and (3) a conceptual framework for orchestration at three levels of narrative strategies, narrative materials, and researcher stance for responsible more-than-human design.

Play is pivotal in fostering the emotional, social, and cultural dimensions of urban spaces. While generative AI (GAI) potentially supports playful urban interaction, a balanced and critical approach to the design opportunities and challenges is needed. This work develops iWonder, an image-to-image GAI tool engaging fourteen designers in urban explorations to identify GAI's playful features and create design ideas. Fourteen citizens then evaluated these ideas, providing expectations and critical concerns from a bottom-up perspective. Our findings reveal the dynamic interplay between users, GAI, and urban contexts, highlighting GAI's potential to facilitate playful urban experiences through generative agency, meaningful unpredictability, social performativity, and the associated offensive qualities. We propose design considerations to address citizen concerns and the `tourist metaphor' to deepen our understanding of GAI's impact, offering insights to enhance cities' socio-cultural fabric. Overall, this research contributes to the effort to harness GAI's capabilities for urban enrichment.

Considered to be an emerging topic in tourism research, traveling to familiar places benefits both the travelers and destinations. However, the current development of familiar tourism is severely affected by the epidemic. Recognizing the potential of virtual reality (VR), this research aims to explore VR’s relevance in the application of visiting familiar places and the empirical features of VR beyond on-site familiar tourism. We first reviewed the literature and developed an experience framework. Secondly, we conducted an exploratory activity in which participants (N = 16) used Google Earth VR to travel to their familiar places with two conditions (free exploration and task-oriented travel). In the activity, we employed think-aloud protocols, a scale, and semi-structured interviews. With our framework, we categorized findings into five dimensions and indicated the similarities and differences between familiar tourism in VR and that in actual places. Particularly, three empirical features (the sense of distance, multi-view space, and montage time) were recognized and formed VR’s opportunity to outperform on-site travel. We conclude by discussing the impacts of VR on familiar tourism and providing implications, including designing the timeline, sounds, tasks, and virtual guides. These suggestions inspire designers to acknowledge VR limitations and identify directions for future tourism applications. As a beginning of empirical investigation on VR familiar tourism, this study opens up a new field of discussion around VR tourism experience. We invite the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community to collectively probe into the VR experience and design of visiting familiar places. Efforts in this area will stretch beyond the current understandings of various forms of tourism and contribute to crafting rich travel experience by immersive technologies.

This pictorial showcases the integration of AI into the design process through the use of image generators. Following a Research Through Design (RTD) approach, we recruited 6 designers to create design proposals with AI. They were invited to collect case studies, make annotated portfolios, collaborate with the generator for design ideation, and undergo semi-structured interviews. Through this process, we gathered empirical data to investigate how designers ideate with AI and what opportunities and challenges emerge in the collaboration. The results showed that the combination of human and AI input in the design process contributes to a fresh form of self-expression and communication. AI was found to bring a distinct perspective that opens up new avenues for artistic expression. The research highlights the potential of AI to augment human creativity and the need for ongoing exploration in this field.

Increasing amounts of sensor-augmented research objects have been used in design research. We call these objects Data-Enabled Objects, which can be integrated into daily activities capturing data about people’s detailed whereabouts, behaviours, and routines. These objects provide data perspectives on everyday life for contextual design research. However, data-enabled objects are still computational devices with limited privacy awareness and nuanced data sharing. To better design data-enabled objects, we explore privacy design spaces by inviting 18 teams of undergraduate design students to re-design the same type of sensor-enabled home research camera. We developed the Connected Peekaboo Toolkit (CPT) to support the design teams in designing, building, and directly deploying their prototypes in real home studies. We conducted Thematic Analysis to analyze their outcomes which led us to interpret that privacy is not just an obstacle but can be a driver by unfolding an exploration of possible design spaces for data-enabled objects.

The use of design fiction to speculate an imaginative and critical future has increasingly been recognized in the design research community. Instead of focusing on speculation with a critical position, this paper reports an experiential approach to entangling everyday experiences in the process of speculating. As science fiction has successfully provided fictional-world-building as entanglement material for speculation, we held a workshop to conduct an entanglement experiment of personal photographs with cyberpunk literature, Neuromancer. We built a card deck consisting of 206 quotes from the novel and invited 15 participants to shuffle, draw, and re-compose sentences that best matched their personal photographs. Purposefully selected everyday anchors and sci-fi features in the quotes allowed us to investigate the moment when an everyday photograph encountered a fictional world. We describe the phenomena of imagination and entanglement, explain experiential entanglement, propose a conceptual model for entangled status, and present interpretations and implications in HCI.

Designing future IoT ecosystems requires new approaches and perspectives to understand everyday practices. While researchers recognize the importance of understanding social aspects of everyday objects, limited studies have explored the possibilities of combining data-driven patterns with human interpretations to investigate emergent relationships among objects. This work presents Thing Constellation Visualizer (thingCV), a novel interactive tool for visualizing the social network of objects based on their co-occurrence as computed from a large collection of photos. ThingCV enables perspective-changing design explorations over the network of objects with scalable links. Two exploratory workshops were conducted to investigate how designers navigate and make sense of a network of objects through thingCV. The results of eight participants showed that designers were actively engaged in identifying interesting objects and their associated clusters of related objects. The designers projected social qualities onto the identified objects and their communities. Furthermore, the designers changed their perspectives to revisit familiar contexts and to generate new insights through the exploration process. This work contributes a novel approach to combining data-driven models with designerly interpretations of thing constellation towards More-Than Human-Centred Design of IoT ecosystems.

Thing-centered design has suggested analyzing our product-scape through the metaphor of agency. However, interaction design with plant-related agency usually animates plants to simulate human behavior. We intend to make interactive things with the ontological nature of plants. Through workshops including guided annotation of six artifacts and situated probes, the senses of the "plantness" of an artifact emerge. Drawing on these understandings, we built and deployed Botanical Printer, which lives with us slowly responding to natural and electronic climates. We present rich results including conceptual, situated, and interactive plantness. Empirical data allow us to explore the future of object-oriented speculation in greater depth.

In the city, mobility is calling for new forms of smartness. To understand what is needed to design thoughtful forms of smart mobility, this paper combines thing ethnography and animistic research approaches to reveal the interwoven networks of personal and social relationships that develop around scooters in Taiwanese everyday life. To this end, a three-day study with six different types of scooterists was conducted in Taipei. Cameras and sensors were directly attached to the scooters themselves, to collect data from a 'thing' perspective. The data collected were then organized and offered to professional actors, who were invited to 'speak' on behalf of the scooters. Through the performance of the actors interpreting and empathizing with the scooter's everyday life, intents, expectations and relationships between scooters and scooterists were revealed and captured. We further discussed how the socio-material networks among scooters could provoke various creative and meaningful arrangements in everyday life.

The Reflexive Printer is a physical artifact combined with a mobile application. It allows digital-photo natives to enrich their experiences of daily reminiscence. Each day, the system takes one picture from a user's smartphone album, prints it on thermal paper as a halftone image, and deletes it from the smartphone. With a critical lens, we reframe technology-mediated reminiscence as an intersubjective interaction between human and artifact. In this mutually informed relationship, we propose perceived drawbacks as a design quality for provoking the critical sensibilities of users and engaging them in transgressing the normality of digital photo consumption. We focus our design thinking on three themes: simple materiality and monological performance, fast consumption and slow rumination, and powerful artifact and feeble user. This paper describes the initial lessons that we have learned through this critical making process and highlights several insights that HCI communities can leverage in the future.

We present GaussBits, which is a system of the passive magnetic tangible designs that enables 3D tangible interactions in the near-surface space of portable displays. When a thin magnetic sensor grid is attached to the back of the display, the 3D position and partial 3D orientation of the GaussBits can be resolved by the proposed bi-polar magnetic field tracking technique. This portable platform can therefore enrich tangible interactions by extending the design space to the near-surface space. Since non-ferrous materials, such as the user's hand, do not occlude the magnetic field, interaction designers can freely incorporate a magnetic unit into an appropriately shaped non-ferrous object to exploit the metaphors of the real-world tasks, and users can freely manipulate the GaussBits by hands or using other non-ferrous tools without causing interference. The presented example applications and the collected feedback from an explorative workshop revealed that this new approach is widely applicable.

This work describes a novel approach to utilizing everyday objects of users as additional, auxiliary, and instant tabletop controllers. Based on this approach, a prototype platform, called iCon, is developed to explore the possible design. Field studies and user studies reveal that utilizing everyday objects such as auxiliary input devices might be appropriate under a multi-task scenario. User studies further demonstrate that daily objects can generally be applied in low precision circumstances, low engagement with selected objects, and medium-to-high frequency of use. The proposed approach allows users to interact with computers while not altering their original work environments.

As internet technology develops, we transfer more and more physical activities into cyberspace. On the other hand, mobile technology frees the location of cyberspace participants, and therefore, the situation and context of an avatar come back to the physical space which not only plays a role of computing interface but also provides physical social interaction and contextual experience. The emerging of locative media in urban space focuses on placing media at a location and in advance, it is often designed, planned, discussed, experienced, and modified forward and backward. Due to the complicated and time-consuming procedure of locative media planning, this paper proposes a collaborative workspace to support tangible, participative, and collaborative design by linking physical location and workspace simultaneously.

Recently, the development of mobile services is becoming more popular. The mobile applications will not only take advantage of contextual information, such as location-awareness, to offer greater services to a mobile host (MH) but maintain existing transport-layer connections as the MH moves from one location to another. This paper exhausts our most recent work: the AcoustaNomad project. AcoustaNomad not only uses the mobile IPv6 to maintain the existing connections even if the MH changes locations and addresses, but utilizes location-aware technique to detect what kind of services the new location provides. In addition, AcoustaNomad shows two mature mobile applications: mobile learning and audio blogging. This paper proposes the architecture of AcoustaNomad and experimental results that demonstrate the ability of AcoustaNomad to enable location-aware services and applications.

Conceptual Farm is a virtual reality platform for generating and observing the behaviors of different autonomous characters. By providing (1) descriptions for characters' behaviors and (2) 3D animations and sound, life-like characters in a realistic habitat can be created, modified, and interact with both users and other characters in real time. The flexible, manageable and scalable nature of Conceptual Farm leads to its desirability in zoological research, general education, game and film production, and even decorative arts.

Digital sculpting is a new trend for creating 3D models, but its application in the manipulation of volumetric data raises several issues that need to be addressed. With the extended marching cubes algorithm (EMC), sharp features of 3D models are well preserved. Additionally, the dynamic nature of modifying models in real time needs to be dealt with in sculpting applications: since the sampling of sharp features is implicit, direct modification on cell data will cause problems. A feature refinement strategy is proposed to preserve the dynamically modified model correct, and efficiently. Overall, the proposed methods provide an adaptive resolution and feature-preserved sculpting system that handles dynamic behavior in real-time performance.

A method is proposed in this paper to automatically generate the animation skeleton of a model such that the model can be manipulated according to the skeleton. With our method, users can construct the skeleton in a short time, and bring a static model both dynamic and alive. The primary steps of our method are finding skeleton joints, connecting the joints to form an animation skeleton, and binding skin vertices to the skeleton. Initially, a repulsive force field is constructed inside a given model, and a set of points with local minimal force magnitude are found based on the force field. Then, a modified thinning algorithm is applied to generate an initial skeleton, which is further refined to become the final result. When the skeleton construction completes, skin vertices are anchored to the skeleton joints according to the distances between the vertices and joints. In order to build the repulsive force field, hundreds of rays are shot radially from positions inside the model, and it leads to that the force field computation takes most of the execution time. Therefore, an octree structure is used to accelerate this process. Currently, the skeleton generated from a typical 3D model with 1000 to 10000 polygons takes less than 2 minutes on a Intel Pentium 4 2.4 GHz PC.

Hand gesture is one of the most natural and expressive ways for the hearing impaired. However, because of the complexity of dynamic gestures, most researches are focused either on static gestures, postures, or a small set of dynamic gestures. As real-time recognition of a large set of dynamic gestures is considered, some efficient algorithms and models are needed. To solve this problem in Taiwanese Sign Language, a statistics based context sensitive model is presented and both gestures and postures can be successfully recognized. A gesture is decomposed as a sequence of postures and the postures can be quickly recognized using hidden Markov model. With the probability resulted from hidden Markov model and the probability of each gesture in a lexicon, a gesture can be easily recognized in a linguistic way in real-time.

Abstract Because of the view independence and photo realistic image generation in a diffuse environment, radiosity is suitable for an interactive walk through system. The drawback of radiosity is that it is time‐consuming in form factor estimation, and furthermore, inserting, deleting or moving an object makes the whole costly rendering process repeat itself. To solve this problem, we encapsulate necessary information for form factor calculation and visibility estimation in each object, which is called a reusable radiosity object. An object is defined as a cluster or clusters of triangles. Whenever a scene updates, the radiosity algorithm looks up the prestored information in each object, thus speeding itself up by two orders of magnitude. Besides, solution time based on cluster representatives is linear to the number of objects since each object is reusable, encapsulated with preprocessed data in every level of hierarchy. We also analyze the unregarded error on visibility estimation and propose a statistically optimal adaptive algorithm to maintain the same error for each link.

Abstract Many ways of communications are used between human and computer, while using gesture is considered to be one of the most natural way in a virtual reality system. Because of its intuitiveness and its capability of helping the hearing impaired or speaking impaired, we develop a gesture recognition system. Considering the world‐wide use of ASL (American Sign Language), this system focuses on the recognition of a continuous flow of alphabets in ASL to spell a word followed by the speech synthesis, and adopts a simple and efficient windowed template matching recognition strategy to achieve the goal of a real‐time and continuous recognition. In addition to the abduction and the flex information in a gesture, we introduce a concept of contact‐point into our system to solve the intrinsic ambiguities of some gestures in ASL. Five tact switches, served as contact‐points and sensed by an analogue to digital board, are sewn on a glove cover to enhance the functions of a traditional data glove.