Many digital technologies, such as social media, community systems, and public displays, have been studied to explore how people engage with each other in their community. Yet little is known about how one form of technology, location-based games (LBGs), can support urban residents in community awareness, city exploration, and placemaking as they navigate spaces and places in their cities. To explore this topic, we investigated the challenges urban residents faced in finding information about their community along a transit network. We then designed, developed, and evaluated an LBG called City Explorer that supports city exploration using gamification and the viewing and sharing of community information. We found that residents valued the fun, competition, and rewards afforded through play in public spaces, creating opportunities for placemaking through location services and knowledge sharing. Players also wanted additional knowledge about their transit commutes, including data about the frequency and routines of their transit rides. Collectively, such ridership data offers potential for smart city initiatives and illustrates that careful design considerations are required to balance people’s needs for play, personal data, privacy, and community information acquisition.

Many working professionals commute via public transit, yet they have limited tools for learning about their urban neighborhoods and fellow commuters. We designed a location-based game called City Explorer to investigate how transit commuters capture, share, and view community information that is specifically tied to locations. Through a four-week field study, we found that participants valued the increased awareness of their personal travel routines that they gained through City Explorer. When viewing community information, they preferred information that was factual rather than opinion-based and was presented at the start and end of their commutes. Participants found less value in connecting with other transit riders because transit rides were often seen as opportunities to disengage from others. We discuss how location-based technologies can be designed to display factual community information before, during, and at the end of transit commutes.

Telepresence attendance at academic conferences is now a reality and allows people who cannot attend in person with the opportunity to still be “present.” This is valuable for people who face accessibility challenges, cost or travel restrictions, or limited time for travel. We have deployed and studied the use of telepresence robots at three ACM conferences, Ubicomp/ISWC 2014, CSCW 2016, and CHI 2016, ranging from remote users having dedicated telepresence robots to users sharing telepresence robots both synchronously and asynchronously. In this article, we report on the telepresence offerings along with the user behaviors, experiences, and the social norms found for remote conference attendance. Our results across the studies focus around three main themes: shared vs. dedicated robot usage, identity presentation and the value and challenges associated with it; and local in-person support through proxies and instant messaging backchannels. These themes point to three different areas of design exploration for telepresence robots, pointing out the limitations of existing design solutions with respect to each theme, areas for future telepresence design work, and the value in considering varied telepresence robot solutions, including both dedicated and shared telepresence robots.

Real-life escape rooms involve players being locked in a room where they have to solve puzzles in order to escape. We conducted an observational and interview study with 38 escape room players to understand how groups of people collaborate in escape rooms, what opportunities escape rooms present as learning environments for improving collaboration, and how the design of escape rooms affects collaboration. Our results show that escape rooms provide people with opportunities to practice a range of collaboration skills, yet not all generalize to real world collaborative situations outside of the escape room. Thus, people may have an opportunity to practice communicating and maintaining an awareness of others, but the design of the room restricts such behaviors. These findings raise design opportunities for future escape rooms related to team dynamics and roles, the acquisition of situational and workspace awareness, and the teaching of conflict resolution techniques.

Couples in Long Distance Relationships (LDRs) often rely on the use of video chat systems to help maintain their relationship. However, designs are typically limited to only supporting face-to-face conversations or providing narrow fields of view. We designed and evaluated MyEyes, a First Person View (FPV) video streaming technology probe made with cardboard goggles and a smartphone. Distance-separated partners see each other's view on their screen where it can overlap their own view (Overlapped), be placed above it (Horizontal), or presented at the same time where each is seen with a different eye (Split). We compared the three different views with couples to explore the effect on social presence and body ownership. The Overlapped View was most preferred by couples and it provided the strongest feeling of co-presence, whereas a Horizontal View provided the greatest sense of mutual understanding. Our qualitative results showed couples valued performing synchronized acts together and doing activities "in" the remote location.