As AI becomes increasingly embedded in daily life, people are turning to these systems for emotional and personal reasons more frequently. Drawing on critical interviews with 10 young adults, this study examines emerging patterns in how users perceive and navigate these interactions. Preliminary findings suggest that participants value AI’s accessibility and non-judgmental tone, especially when seeking emotional support. However, advice-seeking interactions revealed users’ concerns about overly agreeable responses, reduced objectivity, and cultural mismatch, prompting users to adopt their own evaluation strategies toward AI’s suggestions. The findings were briefly discussed in terms of future directions and implications.

HCI is an eclectic intellectual community comprised of researchers from different academic backgrounds applying diverse methodologies to an array of research questions. What is it that unites this community? What makes HCI an academic discipline? Researchers have proposed different frames—science and problem-solving, for example—to make sense of HCI as a unified, cohesive discipline. In this paper, we investigate whether a configurational theory of HCI can contribute to the discourse. As part of our investigation, we propose a configurational theory that is potentially suitable for HCI research. Our examination has led to an understanding of HCI that emphasizes its core object of study rather than its methodologies or tendency towards problem solving. We explore how this approach complements and extends existing discussions of HCI’s disciplinary identity. We end by discussing some potential benefits that a configurational theory might have, such as its ability to serve as a frame of reference for researchers, help researchers position their work in relation to existing work, identify and evaluate research claims and evidence, and assess contribution and knowledge growth in the field.

Abstract Interaction design/HCI seems to be at a crossroads. On the one hand, it is still about designing for engaging user experiences (UX). Still, on the other hand, it seems to be increasingly about reducing interaction and automating human–machine interaction through the use of AI and other new technologies. In this paper, we explore this seemingly unavoidable gap. First, we discuss the fundamental design rationality underpinning interaction and automation of interaction from the viewpoints of classic theoretical standpoints. We then illustrate how these two come together in interaction design practice. Here we examine four examples from already published research on automation of interaction, including how different levels of automation of interaction affect or enable new practices, including coffee making, self-tracking, automated driving, and conversations with AI-based chatbots. Through an interaction analysis of these four examples, we show (1) how interaction and automation are combined in the design, (2) how interaction is dependent on a certain level of automation, and vice versa, and (3) how each example illustrates a different balance between, and integration of interaction and automation. Based on this analysis, we propose a two-dimensional design space as a conceptual construct that takes these aspects into account to understand and analyze ways of combining interaction and automation in interaction design. We illustrate the use of the proposed two-dimensional design space, discuss its theoretical implications, and suggest it as a useful tool—when designing for engaging user experiences (UX), with interaction and automation as two design materials.

People’s daily experiences and the environments they inhabit have become saturated with digital devices and systems. With this shift, new concerns have emerged across the HCI community over the rol...

Abstract ‘Time’ and ‘temporality’ are increasingly addressed in human-computer interaction (HCI) research. From issues related to mapping and visualizing data along timelines via explorations of temporality as a design material to studies of lag and the rhythms of work, time is a recurring perspective in HCI research. In fact, time has been a recurring aspect in HCI research for the past 30 years. Based on this continuous and growing interest in HCI research, we find it to be a good time to explore if ‘time’ can be used as a way to structure and organize HCI research. In this paper, we make one such attempt based on a literature study in which we have focused on how time and temporality has been addressed in HCI research during the past 30 years. In our overview of the field, we explore how time and temporality has played out in HCI along the two dimensions of what and how it has been studied. Based on these two dimensions, we created a 4 × 4 matrix that allowed us to filter the material and categorize HCI research in relation to time and temporality. As a result of our explorations, we have identified a turn to temporality as a design material in HCI, an interest in methods for temporality studies in HCI and in temporality as a theoretical lens. We end with a discussion of some implications of our findings around the notions of (i) waves of time and temporality studies in HCI research, (ii) the potential use of the 4 × 4 matrix and (iii) the consequences of a more fundamental shift from things to events.

Life transitions are an integral part of the human experience. However, research shows that lack of support during life transitions can result in adverse health outcomes. To better understand the support needs and structures of low-income women during transition to motherhood, we interviewed 10 women and their 14 supporters during the transition. Our findings suggest that support needs and structures of mothers evolve during transition, and that they also vary by socio-economic contexts. In this paper, we detail our study design and findings. Informed by our findings, we posit that all life-transitions are not the same, and that therefore, the optimal support intervention point varies for different life transitions. Currently there are no tools available to identify optimal support intervention points during life transitions. To this end, we also introduce a preliminary framework - the Strength-Stress-Analysis (SSA) framework - to identify optimal support intervention points during life-transitions.

It is hard to deny that our artifacts and environments are becoming more and more complex, more and more "alive," and as a consequence more and more demanding. We have to interact more. There seems to be no retreat or escape from interactivity. Some well-informed critics worry that the proliferation of interactions and interactive things has already gone too far. Their concerns raise many questions. Does interactivity in fact increase? How can we know? What does it really mean to claim that it does? And if indeed it is increasing, what does it mean? And why is this happening? And should something be done? Despite this development there seems to be no precise idea of what interaction is and what being interactive means, beyond a vague notion that it is some kind of interplay, usually optimistically understood as good-natured cooperation. In this talk I will present the work I have done for many years, together with my colleague Lars-Erik Janlert. As our approach, maybe best described as analytical and philosophical, we have examined properties and qualities of designed artifacts and systems; primarily those properties that are open for manipulation to designers, that is, properties that designers can and do intentionally affect by their design decisions (and thus in principle are possible to control). Rather than taking users and their subjective experiences of the artifacts and systems as the primary target for examination, unfashionable as it may be, we have chosen to be objective in the sense of focusing on the artifacts and systems. Apart from discussing our approach, I will briefly introduce some of our main results consisting of some developed definitions of existing (and some new) concepts, such as, interactivity, interactability, interactiveness. I will end with some comments on what this kind of investigation can tell us about the future by introducing the notions of faceless interaction, interactivity clutter, and interactivity fields.

What are big questions? Why do scholars propose them? How are they generated? Could they be valuable and useful in HCI research? In this paper we conduct a thorough review of "big questions" literature, which draws on scholarship from a variety of fields and disciplines. Our intended contribution is twofold. First, we provide a substantive review of big questions scholarship, which to our knowledge has never been done before. Second, we leverage this summary as a means of examining the value and utility of big questions in HCI as a research discipline. Whether HCI decides that generating and having big questions would be a desirable path forward, we believe that examining the potential for big questions is a useful way of becoming more reflective about HCI research.

New interactive applications, artifacts, and systems are constantly being added to our environments, and there are some concerns in the human–computer interaction research community that increasing interactivity might not be just to the good. But what is it that is supposed to be increasing, and how could we determine whether it is? To approach these issues in a systematic and analytical fashion, relying less on common intuitions and more on clearly defined concepts and when possible quantifiable properties, we take a renewed look at the notion of interactivity and related concepts. The main contribution of this article is a number of definitions and terms, and the beginning of an attempt to frame the conditions of interaction and interactivity. Based on this framing, we also propose some possible approaches for how interactivity can be measured.

Today's sensor-rich and socially-networked world forces us to ask whether technology is moving us away from an authentic life. We all have different views on what constitutes an authentic life with technology and, through our actions, try to stay true to those views. We describe a design approach called "Designing for Authenticity" that draws from the existentialist philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. It allows researchers engaged in immersive fieldwork to articulate the possible patterns of authentic living with technology. It also outlines a strategy to design artifacts that indirectly communicate to users the experiences of those living in different modes of authenticity. Yet, our approach gives the designer's own informed convictions weight in advocating that one should commit to a spiritual life-view with technology. To illustrate our approach, we subject previously published research on Irish traditional musicians to our designing for authenticity approach.

In a series of interviews and observations conducted over the past two years, we examined how designers have created, adopted, and evolved design methods into practice. These studies have led us to question the processes used and assumptions held by those who have been involved in developing new design methods. Our studies have shown that even though user-centered design is advocated by most researchers and practitioners, when it comes to their own way of developing design methods for others, it is not done using a user-centered approach. However, we found interesting differences among the three categories of interviewees; practitioners, researchers and practitioner/researchers.

Recent research shows that fashion already exists in the HCI domain and influences and affects design and designers' thinking and practices throughout the design process. In this note, we draw our insights from fashion related research within HCI and interaction design, provide some observations about fashion-related design and research practices, raise questions about our field as moving forward towards fashion driven discipline.

In the middle of the present struggle to keep interaction complexity in check, as artifact complexity continues to rise and the technical possibilities to interact multiply, the notion of interface is scrutinized. First, a limited number of previous interpretations or thought styles of the notion are identified and discussed. This serves as a framework for an analysis of the current situation with regard to complexity, control, and interaction, leading to a realization of the crucial role of surface in contemporary understanding of interaction. The potential of faceless interaction, interaction that transcends traditional reliance on surfaces, is then examined and discussed, liberating possibilities as well as complicating effects, and dangers are pointed out, ending with a sketch of a possibly emerging new thought style.

There has been an ongoing conversation about the role and relationship of theory and practice in the HCI community. This paper explores this relationship privileging a practice perspective through a tentative model, which describes a "bubble-up" of ideas from practice to inform research and theory development, and an accompanying "trickle-down" of theory into practice. Interviews were conducted with interaction designers, which included a description of their use of design methods in practice, and their knowledge and use of two common design methods-affinity diagramming and the concept of affordance. Based on these interviews, potential relationships between theory and practice are explored through this model. Disseminating agents already common in HCI practice are addressed as possible mechanisms for the research community to understand practice more completely. Opportunities for future research, based on the use of the tentative model in a generative way, are considered.

As HCI becomes more aware of long-term use experience, users' retrospection might be one starting point to explore prior interactive use. However, due to the limitation of current methodologies and human memory, research participants might recall specific prior use episodes and less their experience over time. In this note, we examine how to encourage retrospection and reflection concerning the changes of use experience in the past and over time. We have reviewed relevant research and traced the usage of temporal references in those studies, such as diagrams of use measurement over time or the history of interactive products. We propose the notion of temporal anchors as way of capturing and grounding temporal aspects of long-term use experience. We have found that methods that include temporal anchors have facilitated opportunities for rich reflections and communications around use experience and temporality.

Critical Design has emerged as an important concept in HCI research and practice. Yet researchers have noted that its uptake has been limited by certain lacks of intellectual infrastructure theories, methodologies, canons and exemplars, and a community of practice. We argue that one way to create this infrastructure is to cultivate a community adept at reading that is, critically interpreting and making reasoned judgments about critical designs. We propose an approach to developing close readings of critical designs, which are both evidence-based and carefully reasoned. The approach highlights analytical units of analysis, the relevance of design languages and social norms, and the analytical contemplation of critical aspects of a design. It is intended to be relatively easy to learn, to try out, and to teach, in the hopes of inviting more members of the HCI community to engage in this practice. We exemplify the approach with readings of two critical designs and reflect on different ways that a design might serve a critical purpose or offer a critical argument about design, society, and the future.

In recent years, HCI researchers have increased their focus on studying the power relationships between researchers and users, and developing methodologies for eliciting design ideas that are sensitive to existing epistemic hierarchies in technology design. The differential value given to expert versus lay knowledge is a central factor in these debates. We apply Artifact Analysis, developed to help designers handle the complexity of digital artifacts, as a method to explore how experts and non-experts understand and frame robots, a technology characterized by significant complexity. Our results show that both non-expert users and expert researchers have knowledge that is significant to future robot development, but they focus on different aspects of the technology - users address mediated and interaction complexity while researchers focus on internal and external complexity. We also found that robots function as boundary objects between experts and users, and suggest that one task designers can perform is to "stay on the boundary" and mediate between the different ways in which experts and non-experts frame emerging technology to develop designs that benefit from insights from both user and researcher perspectives.

With many medical procedures done today, patients are forced to act as passive recipients of care, while nurses and doctors are actively involved in the process of diagnosis or treatment. In this paper, we focus upon patient positioning for radiotherapy treatment, looking at the immobilization and positioning techniques used, and the role of the patient in this process. Our desire to engage patients in the positioning process led to the creation of an experimental positioning system which can enable patients to self-position themselves for treatment. Utilizing the body tracking and skeletal data capabilities of a Kinect™ sensor, our prototype provides visualizations of where an individual's body is in relation to the desired position, and when these two positions have become correctly aligned. Testing demonstrated how our prototype could be used to actively engage patients in the positioning process together with care providers, in a mutually empowering and supportive way.

This note describes our analysis of 35 papers from CHI 2011 that aim to improve or support interaction design practice. In our analysis, we characterize how these CHI authors conceptualize design practice and the types of contributions they propose. This work is motivated by the recognition that design methods proposed by HCI researchers often do not fit the needs and constraints of professional design practice. As a complement to the analysis of the CHI papers we also interviewed 13 practitioners about their attitudes towards learning new methods and approaches. We conclude the note by offering some critical reflections about how HCI research can better support actual design practice.

This paper presents findings from semi-structured interviews with professional interaction designers. The purpose of the study was to examine the relationship between interaction designers and their design tools---specifically the reasons behind their choice of tools. The findings show that the relationship between designers and their tools is more complex than commonly assumed. The paper argues that a deeper understanding of the complexity of the designer-tool relationship can make a difference for both education and practice.

There is an undesirable gap between HCI research aimed at influencing interaction design practice and the practitioners in question. To close this gap, we advocate a theoretical and methodological focus on the day-to-day, lived experience of designers. To date, this type of theory-generative, experientially oriented research has focused on the users of technologies, not the designers. In contrast, we propose that HCI researchers turn their attention to producing theories of interaction design practice that resonate with practitioners themselves. In part one of this paper, we describe the mismatch between HCI research and interaction design practices. Then we present vignettes from an observational study of commercial design practice to illustrate the issues at hand. In part two, we discuss methodological and theoretical changes in research practice that might support the goal of integrating HCI research with interaction design practices. We then discuss current research methods and theories to identify changes that might enlarge our view on practice. In part three, we elaborate on our theoretically minded agenda and a kind of ideal-type theory.

In this paper we discus the complex task of evaluating ambient displays, concentrating on issues within in-situ deployments. We start by describing how these technologies have been evaluated in lab settings, where the focus has been primarily on issues of usability, and argue strongly for the necessity of in-situ evaluation. We then present two case studies involving in-situ evaluations, and from these derive issues that hindered the researchers from being able to delve more deeply into the overall impact of their implementations. We conclude with our own suggestions on possible alternatives to explore for evaluating ambient displays, which are based on the issues derived from our case studies.

We present an approach for exploring materiality of digital artifacts by suggesting a study method---material probe. The purpose with the method is to understand how people perceive material qualities of artifacts and to discuss how designers could intentionally and methodologically include such non-functional user desires related to material qualities in the design of digital artifacts. The study procedure and results from preliminary studies are described with their implications for future work.

The field of HCI is experiencing a growing interest in Research through Design (RtD), a research approach that employs methods and processes from design practice as a legitimate method of inquiry. We are interested in expanding and formalizing this research approach, and understanding how knowledge, or theory, is generated from this type of design research. We conducted interviews with 12 leading HCI design researchers, asking them about design research, design theory, and RtD specifically. They were easily able to identify different types of design research and design theory from contemporary and historical design research efforts, and believed that RtD might be one of the most important contributions of design researchers to the larger research community. We further examined three historical RtD projects that were repeatedly mentioned in the interviews, and performed a critique of current RtD practices within the HCI research and interaction design communities. While our critique summarizes the problems, it also shows possible directions for further developments and refinements of the approach.

In this article, we explore a concept-driven approach to interaction design research with a specific focus on theoretical advancements. We introduce this approach as a complementary approach to more traditional, and well-known, user-centered interaction design approaches. A concept-driven approach aims at manifesting theoretical concepts in concrete designs. A good concept design is both conceptually and historically grounded, bearing signs of the intended theoretical considerations. In the area of human–computer interaction and interaction design research, this approach has been quite popular but not necessarily explicitly recognized and developed as a proper research methodology. In this article, we demonstrate how a concept-driven approach can coexist, and be integrated with, common user-centered approaches to interaction design through the development of a model that makes explicit the existing cycle of prototyping, theory development, and user studies. We also present a set of basic principles that could constitute a foundation for concept driven interaction research, and we have considered and described the methodological implications given these principles. For the field of interaction design research we find this as an important point of departure for taking the next step toward the construction and verification of theoretical constructs that can help inform and guide future design research projects on novel interaction technologies.

An almost explosive growth of complexity puts pressure on people in their everyday doings. Digital artifacts and systems are at the core of this development. How should we handle complexity aspects when designing new interactive devices and systems? In this article we begin an analysis ofinteraction complexity. We portray different views of complexity; we explore not only negative aspects of complexity, but also positive, making a case for the existence ofbenigncomplexity. We argue that complex interaction is not necessarily bad, but designers need a deeper understanding of interaction complexity and need to treat it in a more intentional and thoughtful way. We examine interaction complexity as it relates to different loci of complexity:internal,external, andmediatedcomplexity. Our purpose with these analytical exercises is to pave the way for design that is informed by a more focused and precise understanding of interaction complexity.

This paper takes up the problem of understanding why we preserve some things passionately and discard others without thought. We briefly report on the theoretical literature relating to this question, both in terms of existing literature in HCI, as well as in terms of related literatures that can advance the understanding for the HCI community. We use this reading to refine our frameworks for understanding durability in digital artifice as an issue of sustainable interaction design in HCI. Next, we report in detail on our ongoing work in collecting personal inventories of digital artifice in the home context. We relate our prior and most current personal inventories collections to the framework that owes to our reading of the theoretical literature. Finally, we summarize the theoretical implications and findings of our personal inventories work in terms of implications for the design of digital artifice in a manner that is more durable.

Passwords are ubiquitous, and users and service providers alike rely on them for their security. However, good passwords may sometimes be hard to remember. For years, security practitioners have battled with the dilemma of how to authenticate people who have forgotten their passwords. Existing approaches suffer from high false positive and false negative rates, where the former is often due to low entropy or public availability of information, whereas the latter often is due to unclear or changing answers, or ambiguous or fault prone entry of the same. Good security questions should be based on long-lived personal preferences and knowledge, and avoid publicly available information. We show that many of the questions used by online matchmaking services are suitable as security questions. We first describe a new user interface approach suitable to such security questions that is offering a reduced risks of incorrect entry. We then detail the findings of experiments aimed at quantifying the security of our proposed method.

With the current development towards completely interactive environments realized through ubiquitous computing technologies and new transmaterials, the interaction landscape is changing from consisting of separated computer environments and related human-computer interaction issues, to being more about interactive architecture and human- (digitally enhanced) environment interaction. Given this general shift it becomes important to examine the fundamental challenges, consequences, and implications for design facing interaction designers. In this paper we therefore set out to: 1) describe the general character of these future interactive environments, 2) discuss interaction design challenges related to fully interactive environments, and 3) point at some general implications for design given this new understanding. To exemplify this trend, we describe two ongoing research projects that illustrate some aspects of the changes of the physical environment and changes in the (traditional) relation between the physical environment and its habitants. Finally, we present some arguments for environment interaction theorizing as a fundamental approach to tackle this general and fundamental challenge for the field of human-computer interaction.

The role of prototypes is well established in the field of HCI and Design. A lack of knowledge, however, about the fundamental nature of prototypes still exists. Researchers have attempted to identify different types of prototypes, such as low- vs. high-fidelity prototypes, but these attempts have centered on evaluation rather than support of design exploration. There have also been efforts to provide new ways of thinking about the activity of using prototypes, such as experience prototyping and paper prototyping, but these efforts do not provide a discourse for understanding fundamental characteristics of prototypes. In this article, we propose an anatomy of prototypes as a framework for prototype conceptualization. We view prototypes not only in their role in evaluation but also in their generative role in enabling designers to reflect on their design activities in exploring a design space. We base this framework on the findings of two case studies that reveal two key dimensions: prototypes as filters and prototypes as manifestations. We explain why these two dimensions are important and how this conceptual framework can benefit our field by establishing more solid and systematic knowledge about prototypes and prototyping.