There is an increasing interest in combining interactive technology with food, leading to a new research area called human-food interaction. While food experiences are increasingly benefiting from interactive technology, for example in the form of food tracking apps, 3D-printed food and projections on dining tables, a more systematic advancement of the field is hindered because, so far, there is no comprehensive articulation of the grand challenges the field is facing. To further and consolidate conversations around this topic, we invited 21 HFI experts to a 5-day seminar. The goal was to review our own and prior work to identify the grand challenges in human-food interaction. The result is an articulation of 10 grand challenges in human-food interaction across 4 categories (technology, users, design and ethics). By presenting these grand challenges, we aim to help researchers move the human-food interaction research field forward.

"BIT Special Issue ECCE2021 Editorial." Behaviour & Information Technology, 40(5), pp. 443–444

The paper describes the design case of an accessible handweaving loom that allows people with different disabilities, including cognitive and sensorial disabilities, to weave independently, promoting self-expression and stimulating creativity. The project developed through an intense phase of prototyping activities, resulting in the re-design of a handweaving loom enhanced and transformed through rapid prototyping using digital fabrication technology. People with various types of disabilities, their caregivers and weaving experts were engaged in a series of participatory design workshops focused on eliciting requirements and desires and inspiring the design process. Throughout the project and in the attempt to integrate some automation in the weaving process, a number of issues emerged regarding how to balance flexibility and guidance to support the creative process without constraining it. The discussion of the design case offers a contribution on design for accessibility and a concrete case to reflect on the importance of supporting and stimulating self-expression and creativity in people with special needs. The paper concludes with design recommendations to accommodate needs of people with disabilities which range from functional and instrumental needs, to experiential needs including aesthetics, self-expression and creativity which are usually overlooked in accessibility guidelines.

The question whether deafness is a disability causes controversial and emotionally charged debates. The experience of hearing loss is different from the experience of being born deaf, as well as the need and willingness of using hearing aids. Following a medical model of disability, deafness has been traditionally viewed as a physical impairment. This paper points out highly debated issues related to the design of assistive technologies for people with hearing impairment. It illustrates the design case of a suite of smart jewels designed to address their emotional and socio-cultural needs beyond the functional goal of supporting hearing. The design case calls for a shift in the attitude toward disability - from a medical model which sees impairment as a personal deficiency to be "normalized", to a socio-cultural model which views disability as a socially constructed concept defined by the obstacles of a hearing-oriented world.

The Quietude project uses making, participation and co-design to collectively imagine a more sustainable, aesthetically enriched future for deaf women, by developing wearables that respond to the women's needs and desires: those that are well known, and those that may be only dimly glimpsed. We present our motivation and process, and describe our first workshop that brought together deaf women, ethicists, makers, designers and technology experts. The workshop led to the design and development of an ecology of jewellery products: fashionable accessories that enhance the experience of deaf women by translating sounds into vibration, light patterns and shape change. We reflect on the opportunities and challenges of developing aesthetically rich wearables for deaf women, using experimental participatory design methods, and the value of considering disability as an opportunity for wearables design, rather than as an issue that needs to be addressed or solved.

The excitement around computing technology in all aspects of life requires that we tackle fundamental issues of healthcare, leisure, labor, education, and food to create the society we want. The aim of this satellite event was to bring together a variety of different stakeholders, ranging from local food producers, chefs, designers, engineers, data scientists, and sensory scientists, to discuss the interwoven future of computing technology and food. This event was co-located with the AVI 2018 conference and supported by the ACM Future of Computing Academy (ACM-FCA). The event followed a co-creation approach that encourages conjoined creative and critical thinking that feeds into the formulation of a manifesto on the future of computing and food. We hope this will inspire future discussions on the transformative role of computing technology on food.

User experience (UX) has been defined in several ways.In general terms, it refers to everything that is individually encountered, perceived, or lived through.The literature on UX reports studies mostly focused on specific interaction events, which may have an impact on the user's emotions and feelings.This paper provides a reflection on how UX evolves over time.We performed a medium term study comparing four types of UX: Anticipated, Momentary, Episodic and Remembered (or Cumulative) experience [1].Anticipated UX refers to the period of time before first use, and focuses on the expectations a person has on the product, service or system.Momentary UX refers to any perceived change during the interaction in the very moment it occurs.Episodic UX is an appraisal of a specific usage episode extrapolated from a wider interaction event.Remembered UX is the memory the user has after having used the system for a while.The different facets of UX have been analysed in a medium term research spanning over four weeks.The study compared the experience of ten users of a pedometer/fitness app that counts steps and burned calories all day long.The results show that the experience of use changed over time decreasing significantly before, during and after the interaction.The evaluative judgment related to the overall satisfaction with the product, was largely formed on the basis of an initial high expectation on pragmatic aspects (i.e.utility and usability) before and during the first encounters.After four weeks of use, the problems related to usability, reliability of data, and battery drain became a dominant aspect of how good the product was perceived.Hedonic qualities and Attractiveness were negatively impacted as well.The continuous reflection on the use, documented in online diaries, made the problematic aspects prevailing on the overall UX in particular on the evaluation of Episodic and Remembered UX.This prevented any change in behaviour in the participants.

This paper describes a study conducted in a Care Home with six women affected by dementia. The study focused on storytelling and compared the effect of the seal robot PARO with Sugar, a toy looking like a baby seal, in stimulating the creation of stories either based on personal memories or invented by the person. Narrative is a primitive function of human psychology, lying at the heart of human thought. The representation of experience in narratives provides a frame which enables humans to interpret their experiences. Through storytelling we learn to communicate and make sense of the external world. As Bruner [1] points out, narrative is a fundamental aspect of meaning construction, which is a developmental activity that starts in early childhood and characterizes our entire lives. It is therefore fundamental to maintain narrative competence throughout life, even when the cognitive competencies are impaired, as in the case of dementia. The stories collected during the experimental sessions were evaluated from different points of view: length, terminology, emotional content and coherence. The results show that interacting with Paro, unlike Sugar, stimulates storytelling, encouraging interaction among participants and supporting the construction of more emotionally intense content.

This paper describes the results of a research conducted in the European project Accompany, whose aim is to provide older people with services in a motivating and socially acceptable manner to facilitate independent living at home. The project developed a system consisting of a robotic companion, Care-O-bot, as part of a smart environment. An intensive research was conducted to investigate and experiment with robot behaviours that trigger empathic exchanges between an older person and the robot. The paper is articulated in two parts. The first part illustrates the theory that inspired the development of a context-aware Graphical User Interface (GUI) used to interact with the robot. The GUI integrates an expressive mask allowing perspective taking with the aim to stimulate empathic exchanges. The second part focuses on the user evaluation, and reports the outcomes from three different tests. The results of the first two tests show a positive acceptance of the GUI by the older people. The final test reports qualitative comments by senior participants on the occurrence of empathic exchanges with the robot.

In this paper, we describe the concept of remixing playware, which allows sampling and remixing of both physical and functional (e.g. music content) aspects of a system. Such remixing playware has a number of distinguished features which are explained in the paper: user-configurable modularity, which allows the user to interact and manipulate with samples; user-guided behavior-based system, which allows music compositions to emerge from the way performer interacts with the instruments that provide the primitive behaviours; intelligent sampling as the ability of creating samples that allow anybody to remix with the samples ensuring an engaging outcome. The paper exemplifies remixing playware with a variety of implementations in RoboMusic concerts, the virtual MusicTiles app, the physical MagicCubes, the physical dices in Peter Gabriel concerts, and the S'n'S system. These examples focus on music creation and performance, based upon the concept of RoboMusic, and it is argued that the concept of remixing playware extends to many other application areas of playware.

With changes in life expectancy across the world, technologies enhancing well-being of individuals, specifically for older people, are subject to a new stream of research and development. In this paper we present the ACCOMPANY project, a pan-European project which focuses on home companion technologies. The projects aims to progress beyond the state of the art in multiple areas such as empathic and social human-robot interaction, robot learning and memory visualisation, monitoring persons and chores at home, and technological integration of these multiple approaches on an existing robotic platform, Care-O-Bot®3 and in the context of a smart-home environment utilising a multitude of sensor arrays. The resulting prototype from integrating these developments undergoes multiple formative cycles and a summative evaluation cycle towards identifying acceptable behaviours and roles for the robot for example role as a butler or a trainer. Furthermore, the evaluation activities will use an evaluation grid in order to assess achievement of the identified user requirements, formulated in form of distinct scenarios. Finally, the project considers ethical concerns and by highlighting principles such as autonomy, independence, enablement, safety and privacy, it embarks on providing a discussion medium where user views on these principles and the existing tension between some of these principles for example tension between privacy and autonomy over safety, can be captured and considered in design cycles and throughout project developments.

This paper describes an explorative study to evaluate a dynamic expressive mask associated to a remote robot-view used to control an assistive robot. The mask is generated by a graphical-user-interface platform displayed on a tablet used to control the robot in a smart home environment. The hypothesis of the study is that when robot's behaviour conforms to human social expectations, interactions are more likely to be found enjoyable and meaningful by people. Furthermore the expressivity of the mask is expected to result in empathic interactions with the robot and therefore to sustain rich and meaningful social exchanges. In this study we compared four scenarios of interaction between a robot and a person at home. The scenarios depicted scenes where the robot was asked to execute tasks. Each scenario was showed in two versions: with a static robot-view and with a dynamic, expressive robot-view. The results of a questionnaire administered to 60 persons showed a preference of people to interact with the dynamic expressive mask. Expressivity was a means to stimulate empathic concern and to facilitate perspective taking during the execution of the scenarios.

Over the past years the technology push and the creation of new technological materials made available on the market many new smart materials. Smart Material Interfaces (SMIs) want to take advantage of these materials to overcome traditional patterns of interaction, leaving behind the "digital feeling" by a more continuous space of interaction, tightly coupling digital and physical world by means of the smart materials' properties. With this workshop about SMIs, we want to draw attention to the emerging field, stimulating research and development in interfaces that make use of smart materials and encourage new and different modalities of interaction.

This article presents the design of Iromec, a modular robot companion tailored towards engaging in social exchanges with children with different disabilities with the aim to empower them to discover a wide rage of play styles from solitary to social and cooperative play. In particular this paper focuses on the user-centred design approach taken to develop a robot able to engage in meaningful interaction with different typologies of disable children - Autistic children, Moderate Mentally Retarded children and Severe Motor Impaired children. Modularity and configurability contribute to the flexibility of the system in creating rewarding games that can be easily understood by the child and can promote fun and learning. Other key features of the system are the combination of autonomous and user-controlled behaviour and a strong emphasis on identity and expressiveness that can be dynamically adapted during play. A main contribution of this work is the lessons learned in applying a user-centred perspective in designing the robot: from user requirements to concept design, from the initial prototype evaluation to the redesign and the final testing.

The workshop addresses the emerging field of research on robotics, assistive technologies and interaction design promoting play for physically, visually, and hearing impaired children and for emotionally and mentally handicapped children. Interactive devices including toys, pets and educational tools as well as interactive collaborative environments may represent a unique opportunity for disable children to full engage in play and have fun. The Creative Interactive Play workshop presents a collection of innovative interactive technologies and case studies for inclusive play and discusses the challenges and opportunities they can bid to disabled children.

In this paper, we explore the design of modular robotic objects that may enhance playful experiences. The approach builds upon the development of modular robotics to create a kind of playware, which is flexible in both set-up and activity building for the end-user to allow easy creation of games. Key features of this design approach are modularity, flexibility, and construction, immediate feedback to stimulate engagement, activity design by end-users, and creative exploration of play activities. These features permit the use of such modular playware by a vast array of users, including disabled children who often could be prevented from using and taking benefits from modern technologies. The objective is to get any children moving, exchanging, experimenting and having fun, regardless of their cognitive or physical ability levels. The paper describes two prototype systems developed as modular robotic tiles, and discusses the challenges and opportunities of this modular playware when used by children with different cognitive abilities.

This article presents the design of Iromec, a modular robot companion tailored towards engaging in social exchanges with children with different disabilities with the aim to empower them to discover a wide rage of play styles from solitary to social and cooperative play. In particular this paper focuses on the design of play scenarios and specific robot features for engaging in meaningful interaction with different typologies of disable children - Autistic children, Moderate Mentally Retarded children and Severe Motor Impaired children. Modularity and configurability contribute to the flexibility of the system in creating rewarding games that can be easily understood by the child and can promote fun and learning. Other key features of the system are the combination of autonomous and user-controlled behaviour and a strong emphasis on identity and expressiveness that can be dynamically adapted during play.

This paper outlines the use of modular robotics to encourage and facilitate nonverbal communication during therapeutic intervention in dementia care. A set of new socially interactive modular robotic devices called rolling pins (RPs) has been designed and developed to assist the therapist in interacting with dementia-affected patients. The RPs are semitransparent plastic tubes that are capable of measuring their orientation and the speed of their rotation; at a local level, they have three types of feedback: red, green, and blue light, sound, and vibration. The peculiarity of the RPs is that they are able to communicate with each other or with other devices equipped with the same radio communication technology. The RPs are usually used in pairs, as the local feedback of an RP can be set depending not only on its own speed and orientation but also on the speed and the orientation of the peer RP. The system is not used as a therapeutic toolpersebut as a facilitator and a mediator of social dynamics during normal therapy to counteract social isolation that can result in dementia through the loss of social skills. An experiment is reported that shows that by using the RPs, the patients participated in the activity by coordinating their behavior with the therapist and imitating the same interaction patterns generated by the therapist.

Current technologies often tend to emphasise utilitarian versions of work, entertainment, and consumer activity by embodying a representation of the privileged activities they support and the values predefined by the designer. Social robots offer an extraordinary opportunity to design technologies with open-ended possibilities for interaction and engagement with humans. In the paper, we present the results of a case study conducted in a nursing home with elderly people interacting with the seal robot Paro. The results of the study show that the robot actively supports our natural disposition to attribute intentional states to inanimate or artificial objects. In addition interesting interpretative dynamics developing in human robot interaction emerged in the study: mental compromised subjects alternate their assessment of the robot from an inanimate object to an agent, depending on the severity of their disease. However, the observation shows that also subjects talking about the robot as an inanimate object, continue to be emotionally and intellectually involved in the experience. In this respect, agentivity does not seem to be a key factor in assuring a pleasurable and intriguing interaction experience

We used inspiration from modular robotics to create novel tools for dementia treatment based on activity analyses together with therapists and elderly in an Italian home care. This paper presents the technological development of such tools. In general, the tools are becoming part of a "multi-sensory room", i.e. a space augmented by innovative technologies, that can be configured for different therapeutic activities and needs and that leverages sensory stimulation. The development of the tools is inspired by modular robotics in order to allow for space re-configurability and adaptivity, which should support customized therapeutic interventions, and hopefully involve dementia affected users in the interaction with the solutions