We report on a long-term participatory design research project in three social housing apartments that explores how design can extend the catalogue of domestic (energy) technologies beyond dominant industrial premises of scalability and efficiency. This pictorial walks through dioramas of the homes and their idiosyncrasies – constructed from visits, sketches, probes, participant-taken photographs, floor plans, local histories and theories, reflections, and speculations. We argue that homes and households, particularly in contexts that require resourcefulness, act as repositories of alternative potentials. Through a situated spatial analysis, we explore how residents navigate the gaps between standardized architecture and diverse, lived spaces using low and high-tech solutions that work. Four resulting designs collectively sensitize and expand an alternative approach to designing domestic technologies, challenging dominant notions of what counts as novel in the context of the home.

The progression of dementia leads to a loss of initiative and agency, halting daily activities, hobbies, or social encounters. Open-ended play can encourage initiative but remains underexplored in dementia. This paper explores how technology-driven design can support open-ended play, making social interactions more enjoyable and renewing interest in daily activities. We conducted five workshops at dementia daycare facilities, observing people with dementia engage with playful circuit-building toolkits to identify strategies. Findings reveal these toolkits stimulated self-direction and initiative to accomplish self-imposed goals, both independently and collaboratively. We show how open-ended play fosters confidence, resilience, social engagement, and self-expression, allowing people with dementia to exercise choice and share moments of achievement. We provide design implications for technology to stimulate initiative through open-ended play by 1) balancing structure and freedom, 2) emphasizing novelty and material diversity for non-verbal social connection, and 3) considering age-appropriate aesthetics.

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.

Airbnb is well known for providing guests with local experiences by regular people worldwide. Many pioneer hosts experiment with emerging smart products to improve guests’ experiences. However, these initial efforts often merely provide functionality, neglecting to offer guests authentic experiences motivated by hosts’ authenticity. We addressed this gap by using bespoke design methods to understand hosts’ stories and co-develop interaction concepts that can express their authenticity and fit their Airbnb. We implemented a set of Digital Concierges (DCs) and deployed them in a real Airbnb to investigate guests’ experiences. Our results show that our design enhanced guests’ sense of welcome, fostered their discovery with serendipitous cues, and built richer connections with the host and locals. We concluded with the design implications of co-designing artifacts to embody hosts’ authenticity and use multiple modalities to enhance perceived authentic experiences. Most importantly, we shared our insights about working with hosts as co-creators.

Together with 11 lower-income households, we explored how assumptions embedded in domestic energy interfaces match their needs, expectations, and everyday practices around domestic energy use and comfort. Catalyzed by cultural probes, residents (1) shared the diverse strategies and know-how involved in making themselves comfortable, (2) offered arguments for their everyday futures, and (3) explained what we can learn from them. A first tentative definition of energy interfaces opens the door to what we consider interfaces, how they support developing know-how and how they co-construct everyday practices. Residents’ resourceful solutions elicit reflections on what is considered valid participation in the energy transition. From the findings, we synthesize alternative starting points for the design of energy interfaces: We outline design opportunities to expand the (un)comfortable by revisiting comfort as fluid and multi-sensory. Furthermore, we sensitize how design can build on residents’ existing strategies for making comfortable, rather than replace them.

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.

People with dementia and their caregivers aging in place have expressed the need for social, emotional, and recreational interventions at home. Listening to everyday sounds evokes memories and provides conversational cues to support social relations and elicit emotional responses for people with dementia. However, research has yet to explore how these meaningful experiences can be transferred into home settings. This paper presents the insights from our co-design study that involved three people with dementia and their partners in developing an interactive sound player for listening to everyday sounds at home. We report on the motivations of people with dementia and their caregivers to engage in meaningful sound-based activities at home and present the Tumbler as a prototype to foster initiative and agency in exploring familiar everyday sounds. We present design implications of how sound can enrich the everyday experiences of dementia by facilitating social and pleasurable moments at home.

Research in HCI is increasingly investigating the role of technology in supporting meaningful and social activities to enhance the lived experiences of people with dementia. However, to further enrich the daily experiences in care, more insight is needed into how technology can directly promote social participation and pleasurable experiences in everyday care situations. This paper discusses the deployment of VITA and SAM: two research products that address the social and emotional needs of residents in day-to-day dementia care. We report how both products offered aesthetic and sensory enrichment, created new experiences in the everyday, and were integrated into the care environment. Furthermore, we identify implications for design to provide: 1) aesthetics in care, 2) authentic experiences, 3) reinforcing everyday life, and 4) community-driven use in practice. We contribute to existing research by demonstrating how technology for dementia care can transcend instrumental use and culminate in warm-felt everyday experiences.

External human-machine interfaces (eHMIs) support automated vehicles (AVs) in interacting with vulnerable road users such as pedestrians. While related work investigated various eHMIs concepts, these concepts communicate their message in one go at a single point in time. There are no empirical insights yet whether distance-dependent multi-step information that provides additional context as the vehicle approaches a pedestrian can increase the user experience. We conducted a video-based study (N = 24) with an eHMI concept that offers pedestrians information about the vehicle’s intent without providing any further context information, and compared it with two novel eHMI concepts that provide additional information when approaching the pedestrian. Results show that additional distance-based information on eHMIs for yielding vehicles enhances pedestrians’ comprehension of the vehicle’s intention and increases their willingness to cross. This insight posits the importance of distance-dependent information in the development of eHMIs to enhance the usability, acceptance, and safety of AVs.

Recently, the HCI community has seen increased interest in the design of teaching augmentation (TA): tools that extend and complement teachers' pedagogical abilities during ongoing classroom activities. Examples of TA systems are emerging across multiple disciplines, taking various forms: e.g., ambient displays, wearables, or learning analytics dashboards. However, these diverse examples have not been analyzed together to derive more fundamental insights into the design of teaching augmentation. Addressing this opportunity, we broadly synthesize existing cases to propose the TA framework. Our framework specifies a rich design space in five dimensions, to support the design and analysis of teaching augmentation. We contextualize the framework using existing designs cases, to surface underlying design trade-offs: for example, balancing actionability of presented information with teachers' needs for professional autonomy, or balancing unobtrusiveness with informativeness in the design of TA systems. Applying the TA framework, we identify opportunities for future research and design.

The representation of sounds derived from everyday life can be beneficial for people with dementia by evoking memories and emotional responses. Despite this potential, integrating sound and sound-based interventions in care facilities has not received much research attention. In this paper, we present the findings from a field study that explored the responses of 19 people with advanced dementia to a selection of everyday sounds presented to them in a care home and the role of these responses in the care environment. To study this, we deployed Vita, a 'pillow-like' sound player, in two dementia care facilities for four weeks, during which observations were recorded. Afterwards, we conducted interviews with caregivers who used Vita in everyday care practice. Our findings reveal how everyday sounds provided by Vita stimulated meaningful conversation, playfulness, and connection between residents and caregivers. Furthermore, we propose design implications for integrating everyday sounds in dementia care.

Reflection is of increasing interest in HCI as it has many potential benefits in design, education and everyday life. In this paper, we explore media-supported reflection through the design and deployment of three concepts. In contrast to prevalent reflective approaches that are based on system-collected data, we explore how user-created media can support personal reflection. Three interactive prototypes were developed, focusing on different modalities: Balance uses audio, Cogito uses text, and Dott uses visual media. We evaluate these concepts in an in-thewild study that is both explorative and comparative. We found that the open-ended systems primarily supported reflection during the creation of media and that the use depended on opportunity and triggers. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our findings regarding the method and the implications of our findings for the broader area of design for reflection.

There has been an increased interest in researching the beneficial effects of everyday sounds, other than music on people with dementia. However, to turn this potential into concrete design applications, a qualitative understanding of how people engage with sound is needed. This paper presents the outcomes of three workshops, exploring the personal experiences evoked by soundscapes of people in early to mid-stages of dementia. Using the dementia soundboard, we provide key insights into how sounds from everyday life triggered personal associations, memories of the past, emotional responses, and the sharing of experiences. Furthermore, we identified several design considerations and practical insights for sound-based technologies in the context of dementia care. This paper sets out a path for further design-research explorations and development of concrete sound-based interventions, for enriching the everyday lives of people with dementia.

Reflecting on their performance during classroom-teaching is an important competence for teachers. Such reflection-in-action (RiA) enables them to optimize teaching on the spot. But RiA is also challenging, demanding extra thinking in teachers' already intensive routines. Little is known on how HCI systems can facilitate teachers' RiA during classroom-teaching. To fill in this gap, we evaluate ClassBeacons, a system that uses spatially distributed lamps to depict teachers' ongoing performance on how they have divided their time and attention over students in the classroom. Empirical qualitative data from eleven teachers in 22 class periods show that this ambient information facilitated teachers' RiA without burdening teaching in progress. Based on our theoretical grounding and field evaluation, we contribute empirical knowledge about how an HCI system enhanced teachers' process of RiA as well as a set of design principles for unobtrusively supporting RiA.

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.

The number of systems in commercially available vehicles that assist or automate driving tasks is rapidly increasing. At least for the next decade, using such systems remains up to the discretion of the user. In this paper, different reasons why drivers may disengage the autopilot are investigated. This was done through a simulator study in which the system could drive fully automated, but where participants could also disengage the system. Qualitative data were collected about why participants disengaged the autopilot. The analysis of the data revealed six themes covering the reasons why participants disabled the autopilot: The speed maintained by the autopilot, the behavior of the autopilot in relation to overtaking other vehicles, onset of boredom, onset of sleepiness, lack of trust in the autopilot, and enjoyment of manual driving. On the basis of the results, design opportunities are proposed to counteract the tendency to not use automated driving 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.

As necessary for creating a learner-centered environment, nowadays teachers are expected to be more mindful about their proximity distribution: how to spend time in different locations of the classroom with individual learners. However feedback on this is only given to teachers by experts after classroom observation. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of ClassBeacons, a novel ambient information system that visualizes teachers' physical proximity through tangible devices distributed over the classroom. An expert review and a field evaluation with eight secondary school teachers were conducted to explore potential values of such a system and gather user experiences. Results revealed rich insights into how the system could influence teaching and learning, as well as how a distributed display can be seamlessly integrated into teachers' routines.

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.

In modern traffic, measures are implemented to regulate speeding, which may annoy drivers who pursue an exciting driving experience and make them exceed speed limits. Others prefer a more relaxing experience resulting in socially desired driving behavior. This paper presents a study investigating the capacity of ambient light to alter the perception of speed and therefore influence the driving experience. The aim of this study was to determine how different drivers experience the concept of an ambient light moving along the a-pillar inside the vehicle. In different conditions, the light moved at different speeds. The outcomes of the study show that overall the ambient light used in this study had a positive effect on the driving experience but that the attitude towards the ambient light was highly individual. The majority indicated a preference towards the ambient light while some saw it more as a distraction or even inducing more stress.

Continuous developments in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) are resulting in an omnipresence of digital technologies in our everyday lives, which is also visible in the presence of supportive technologies in education. These technologies, e.g. tablets and computers, usually require focused attention to be operated, which hinders teachers from appropriating them while teaching. Peripheral interactive systems, which do not require focused attention, could play a role in relieving teachers' cognitive load, such that mental resources are freed to focus on other teaching tasks. This paper presents an exploratory study on enabling such cognitive offloading through peripheral interaction in the classroom. We present the design and a seven-week field deployment of FireFlies2 interactive tangible pixels which are distributed over the classroom. Our findings show that FireFlies2 supported cognitive processes of teachers and pupils in a number of scenarios.

Reflection in and on everyday life can provide self-insight, increase gratitude and have a positive effect on well-being. To integrate reflection in everyday life, media technologies can provide support. In this paper, we explore how both media creation & use in different modalities can support reflection. We present the ongoing work of designing and building Balance, Cogito, and Dott, focusing on media in audible, textual and visual form. We discuss our research-through-design process and address the differences between modalities in terms of interaction, tangibility, and the integration in everyday life.

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.

Reflection gives insight, supports action and can improve wellbeing. People might want to reflect more often for these benefits, but find it difficult to do so in everyday life. Research in HCI has shown the potential of systems to support reflection in different contexts. In this paper we present a design space for supporting everyday life reflection. We produced a workbook with a selection of conceptual design proposals, which show how systems can take different roles in the process of reflection: triggering, supporting and capturing. We describe a design space with two dimensions by combining these roles with strategies found in literature. We contribute to the extensive body of work on reflection by outlining how design for everyday life reflection requires a focus on more holistic reflection, design with openness and integration in everyday life.

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.

The aim of this study was to validate the stability of the different factors of the Multidimensional Driving Style Inventory (MDSI) [16], which was originally developed and validated with participants in different geographical areas of Israel. In this study, the questionnaire was distributed in the Netherlands and Belgium. A factor analysis of the data of 364 participants revealed five of the eight factors that resulted from the original factor analysis: Angry driving, Anxious driving, Dissociative driving, Distress-reduction driving, and Careful driving style. In addition, 24 items divided over the five factors seem to be stable compared to the 44 items divided over the eight factors of the original analysis. The factors revealed through the analysis of these data were used to determine driver profiles, consisting of one or two driving styles. The next step is to compare self-report data on driving style to actual driving behaviour.

Many actions in the physical world take place in the background or periphery of people’s attention. However, interactions with computing technologies usually require focused attention. This article explores the concept of peripheral interaction: physical interaction with technology that takes place outside the focus of attention. A peripheral interaction design (called FireFlies), which supports primary school teachers in their everyday routine through open-ended light-objects on the children’s desks, was deployed in 4 classrooms for 6 weeks. Results of interviews and video analysis indicate that the 6 participating teachers were able to physically interact with the FireFlies interactive artifact quickly and frequently without disturbing ongoing tasks. In the final weeks of the study, the teachers seemed able to easily shift their focus of attention between their main task and the interactive system. We therefore conclude that, even though it is difficult to measure people’s attention, a longitudinal approach seemed effective to find indicators for peripheral interaction.

Open-ended play with interactive objects provides children with the freedom to construct their own rules, goals and meaning. Instead of games with strict rules, open-ended play designs offer interaction opportunities as a trigger for creating personalized games. The process of developing these designs differs from designs with predefined use. This paper presents the further development of a design approach on how to design for open-ended play. We give an overview of related work and analyze eight existing open-ended play designs. Next, interviews with design students are discussed that illustrate the process of developing open-ended play designs. As a conclusion, we describe our design approach for open-ended play, including an improved definition of open-ended play, an overview of which design parameters have to be considered and advice for tailoring a design process to consider these parameters.

The speed behavior of drivers is influenced by their personal driving values. It is assumed that these personal values may differ between drivers. In this paper, we describe the development of the Personal Driving Values (PDV) questionnaire. The questionnaire is to be used as a means of identifying personal values of drivers underlying their speed behavior. The development of the questionnaire items was inspired by other driving questionnaires, but the aim is to extract factors that represent the personally relevant values in driving. A questionnaire consisting of 49 items was distributed to 250 drivers. An exploratory factor analysis resulted in a final 25-item questionnaire addressing six different driving values: Sustainable Driving, Driving Fun, Driving Relaxed, Safe Driving, Driving Efficiency (Time) and Avoiding Fines.

This paper presents a research-through-design study into interactive systems for a primary school setting to support teachers' everyday tasks. We developed an open-ended interactive system called FireFlies, which is intended to be interacted with in the periphery of the teacher's attention and thereby become an integral part of everyday routines. FireFlies uses light-objects and audio as a (background) information display. Furthermore, teachers can manipulate the light and audio through physical interaction. A working prototype of FireFlies was deployed in four different classrooms for six weeks. Qualitative results reveal that all teachers found a relevant way of working with FireFlies, which they applied every day of the evaluation. After the study had ended and the systems were removed from the schools, the teachers kept reaching for the devices and mentioned they missed FireFlies, which shows that it had become part of their everyday routine.

This paper explores the concept of peripheral interactions; interactions with technology that take place in the background or periphery of the attention. We present two designs for a classroom setting. CawClock makes selected time frames audible in order to provide teachers with awareness of time. NoteLet is designed to support the teacher in observing children's behavior, by enabling him or her to take pictures of the classroom through straightforward interactions on a bracelet. A qualitative, two-week exploration of both systems in a classroom revealed that the soundscapes of CawClock indeed shifted to the periphery of the attention and supported the teacher's time awareness. The actions with NoteLet did not shift to the periphery. However, the tangible aspects of NoteLet seemed to facilitate the interaction to be quick and simple, which may indicate that it could shift to the periphery with more practice. Tangible interaction therefore seems a promising interaction style for this purpose.

Interactions in and with the physical world have enabled us to perform everyday activities in the periphery of our attention. Even though digital technologies are becoming increasingly present in the everyday environment, interaction with these technologies usually requires people’s focused attention. In the realm of the vision of calm technology, we think that designing interactions with the digital world inspired by our peripheral interaction with the physical world, will enable digital technologies to better blend into our everyday lives. However, for such interaction design to be effective, a detailed understanding of the everyday periphery is required. In this paper, we therefore present a qualitative study on everyday activities that may take place in the periphery of the attention. We provide a broad range of examples of such everyday activities and cluster them to present the conditions under which they may be performed peripherally. Furthermore, we discuss how our findings may be relevant for the design of peripheral interactions with digital technologies, and present two conceptual designs that are based on our findings.

When designing with young children, designers usually select user centred design methods based on the children’s required level of engagement and the inspiration expected to be created according to the designer. User centred design methods should be selected for their suitability for children and for the quality of the output of the design method. To understand the suitability of design methods, a framework was developed to describe design methods in terms of required design skills as identified by the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The proposed framework could provide the basis for a tool to compare design methods and to generate hypotheses about what design method would work optimally with children in a specific school grade. The initial examination of the viability of the framework is a comparison of design methods by the number of skills involved; earlier work showed that the involvement of more skills (as with, e.g. low-fi prototyping) could result in more options for a design problem than the involvement of fewer skills (as with e.g. brainstorming). Options and Criteria were counted to understand the quality of the method in terms of the amount of design-information. The results of the current paper indicate that 8-to-10-year-old children generate significantly more options in prototyping sessions than when they are involved in sessions applying a Nominal Group Technique. The paper indicates that (a) with the framework we can generate hypotheses to compare design methods with children and (b) that the outcome of various design methods, which might lead to very different representations, can be compared in terms of Options and Criteria. Further usage of the framework is expected to result in empirical support for selecting a design method to be applied with young children.

Simple tones in in-car systems are mostly used for status indication or warning and alerting purposes. We argue that simple tones can also be used for the purpose of advising drivers through an Advanced Driver Assistance System (ADAS). Our ADAS application is called Cooperative Speed Assistance (CSA), where drivers receive advice to slow down or speed up to coordinate their speed with the speed of other vehicles in the traffic. Two concepts of auditory messages are presented: Looping messages are played as long as the advice applies, while Toggle messages mark the beginning and the end of an advice. For each concept, two prototypes of simple-tone signals were designed based on existing guidelines about sound characteristics affecting urgency and evaluation by users. The temporal characteristics of the signals indicated how much or how fast drivers should adapt their speed. The concepts were evaluated by having users drive in a driving simulator. Objective measurements indicated that there was no difference in effectiveness between the two concepts. Subjective evaluation indicated that users preferred the Toggle concept.

This paper describes three design values that we apply for designing playful interactions. Interactive play objects can stimulate social interaction and physical play by providing motivating feedback to players’ behavior; they can allow players to create their own game goals and rules in an open-ended play context and support social player interaction patterns. This design approach is illustrated by six design cases in which our assumptions were examined in various play contexts. The results show that the application of these design values can lead to rich and appealing innovative play concepts. Players can create a wide range of (physical) games using open-ended play objects, and properties of the play objects, such as being personal or shared, influence the type of social interaction.

An Intelligent Playground is an environment with interactive objects that, using advanced technology such as sensors and actuators, react to the interaction with the children and actively encourage children to play. Thus, an intelligent playground stimulates children to move and play together. In this way, it provides for a healthy alternative for popular pastimes such as computer games and television.\nWe propose a design research agenda for Intelligent Playgrounds, identifying key issues regarding the design of these playgrounds: social interaction, simplicity, challenge, goals and feedback. We illustrate these issues by referring extensively to related work in this area. In addition, we present our design approach, initial findings and future plans on the basis of two case studies of new intelligent playground concepts.

This paper describes a study in which the outcome of early design sessions with eight-to-twelve-year old children is assessed through expert judgment. Experts compare the outcomes of two early design methods: brainstorming and prototyping. The design case was to come up with a solution for incapacitated children that need to attend class from home. The hypothesis is that children will generate more creative design solutions when prototyping than when brainstorming, because we reason that prototyping requires a wider range of intelligences according to Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The outcome of the sessions is assessed on creativity and five explanatory criteria. The results show that a brainstorming method generates design solutions that are more creative. However, both methods produce creative design solutions; the brainstorming sessions generate more surprising and novel design solutions, the prototyping results are considered more relevant and workable.

In this paper we describe a study that explored the implications of the Social Translucence framework for designing systems that support communications at work. Two systems designed for communicating availability status were empirically evaluated to understand what constitutes a successful way to achieve Visibility of people's communicative state. Some aspects of the Social Translucence constructs: Visibility, Awareness and Accountability were further operationalized into a questionnaire and tested relationships between these constructs through path modeling techniques. We found that to improve Visibility systems should support people in presenting their status in a contextualized yet abstract manner. Visibility was also found to have an impact on Awareness and Accountability but no significant relationship was seen between Awareness and Accountability. We argue that to design socially translucent systems it is insufficient to visualize people's availability status. It is also necessary to introduce mechanisms stimulating mutual Awareness that allow for maintaining shared, reciprocical knowledge about communicators' availability state, which then can encourage them to act in a socially responsible way.

This paper presents Reconexp, a diary method supported by a distributed application, which partly runs on a mobile device and partly on a website, enabling us to survey user attitudes, experiences and requirements in field studies. Reconexp combines aspects of the Experience Sampling Method and the Day Reconstruction Method aiming to reduce data loss, improve data quality and reduce burden put upon participants. We discuss our first experiences of using this method in the context of a study of communication needs of working parents with young children.

Autobiographical memory (AM) is the “memory for the events in one’s life” [ 1 ]. Often it is assumed that in order to remember all those events, you just need to record everything and when you replay these recordings you will remember those events. You can compare this with a library metaphor that has been used to explain AM according to the record-keeping approach. However, after many years of AM-research it was concluded that AM is stored in a different manner, namely according to the constructionist approach, which often is initiated by memory cues. This paper explains these AM theories, surveys literature on existing augmented memory systems and describes our own work in this area. All this input is combined into eight design recommendations for future augmented memory systems.

This paper describes a study which compares the outcome of two early design methods for children: brainstorming and prototyping. The hypothesis is that children will uncover more design ideas when prototyping than when brainstorming, because prototyping requires the use of a wider range of Intelligences according to Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences. The protocols were coded using Design Rationale Theory: distinguishing between Options (design solutions) and evaluation Criteria. The results show that as expected children provided more Options in sessions that appeal to a wider range of intelligences. However, unexpectedly children provided more Criteria in the session that appealed mostly to one intelligence.

Against the background of developments in the area of speech-based and multimodal interfaces, we present research on determining the addressee of an utterance in the context of mixed human-human and multimodal human-computer interaction. Working with data that are taken from realistic scenarios, we explore several features with respect to their relevance to the question who is the addressee of an utterance: eye gaze both of speaker and listener, dialogue history and utterance length. With respect to eye gaze, we inspect the detailed timing of shifts in eye gaze between different communication partners (human or computer). We show that these features result in an improved classification of utterances in terms of addressee-hood relative to a simple classification algorithm that assumes that "the addressee is where the eye is", and compare our results to alternative approaches.

Design and user evaluation of a multimodal interaction style for music programming is described. User requirements were instant usability and optional use of a visual display. The interaction style consists of a visual roller metaphor. User control of the rollers proceeds by manipulating a force feedback trackball. Tactual and auditory cues strengthen the roller impression and support use without a visual display. The evaluation investigated task performance and procedural learning when performing music programming tasks with and without a visual display. No procedural instructions were provided. Tasks could be completed successfully with and without a visual display, though programming without a display needed more time to complete. Prior experience with a visual display did not improve performance without a visual display. When working without a display, procedures have to be acquired and remembered explicitly, as more procedures were remembered after working without a visual display. It is demonstrated that multimodality provides new ways to interact with music.