This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web application. We used this approach in an urban community in the UK and a rural community in Greece as part of ongoing place-based initiatives. Our findings show how participants connected personal and emotional stories with structural issues, countered official, ‘authorised’ discourses about both places, and how maps and videos created after the walks acted as boundary objects. We reflect on the claims of walking as a method that fosters equitable researcher-participant relationships, outline future design directions for participatory walking and mapping technologies, and consider the value of walking methods and map-making for participatory design.

We describe the design of Loci Stories – a networked storytelling cabinet which uses voice recognition to tell colourful and unique stories from volunteers working at an English country hall. Loci Stories was created as part of a wider co-design research within heritage venues that sought to improve interpretation and designs approaches engaging with polyvocality. The work aimed to nuance existing authorised heritage discourse interpretations by championing the stories of volunteers who have a unique perspective on the place. We contribute an account of our design and its evaluation findings to propose four “textures” of polyvocality inspired by music theory – monophony, homophony, polyphony, and cacophony. We discuss Loci Stories through the lens of these textures and situate our work in furthering the design space of polyvocal heritage-based interaction design.

Student mental health and wellbeing have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Postgraduate research (PGR) students are at risk of experiencing mental health concerns and this, with the often isolated and competitive nature of their work, can impact their sense of community and social connectedness. In response to these concerns, we designed Pears, a system to connect PGR students for regular “pearings” (in-person meetings) and provide activities to promote reflection and conversation. A four-week evaluation of Pears with 15 students highlighted its potential to sometimes, but not always, facilitate peer support. Some participants would instead meet formally and according to their needs, others instead used the system to make new social connections. Additionally, some participants who faced work-related difficulties during the study found using the system contributed to their stress levels. We conclude by noting how technologies that encourage peer support can help build social relationships, providing an avenue to share similar PhD experiences and guidance for those new to the experience, while importantly raising awareness and an understanding for the need to take time for self-care. However, these technologies must be utilised carefully, and are not a replacement for other sources of student support in universities.

We describe a Research-through-Design (RtD) project that explores the Internet of Things (IoT) as a resource for children's free play outdoors. Based on initial insights from a design ethnography, we developed four RtD prototypes for social play in different scenarios of use outdoors, including congregating on a street or in a park to play physical games with IoT. We observed these prototypes in use by children in their free play in two community settings, and report on the qualitative analysis of our fieldwork. Our findings highlight the designs' material qualities that encouraged social and physical play under certain conditions, suggesting social affordances that are central to the success of IoT designs for free play outdoors. We provide directions for future research that addresses the challenges faced when deploying IoT with children, contributing new considerations for interaction design with children in outdoor settings and free play contexts.

Motivated by the effects of the filter bubble and echo chamber phenomena on social media, we developed a smart home device, Spkr, that unpredictably "pushes" socio-political discussion topics into the home. The device utilised trending Twitter discussions, categorised by their socio-political alignment, to present people with a purposefully assorted range of viewpoints. We deployed Spkr in 10 homes for 28 days with a diverse range of participants and interviewed them about their experiences. Our results show that Spkr presents a novel means of combating selective exposure to socio-political issues, providing participants with identifiably diverse viewpoints. Moreover, Spkr acted as a conversational prompt for discussion within the home, initiating collective processes and engaging those who would not often be involved in political discussions. We demonstrate how smart home assistants can be used as a catalyst for provocation by altering and pluralising political discussions within households.

Volunteers are an underused but important resource in presenting plural heritages within large heritage organizations. We report on a qualitative study at a heritage site in the UK which combined explorations of volunteers' practice and digital design. The study comprised of observational fieldwork with co-creative activities across eight linked workshops, where we explored the site with volunteers, and how we might leverage existing working structures to make new design prototypes. Our collective account contributes new insights on working with volunteers and the opportunities that arise from acknowledging them as genius loci - recognising them as experts of their own experience and capturing and supporting their skills as storytellers. Working with the volunteering staff in a co-design process we created innovative designs including our Un-authorised View, which draws out the unique perspectives and the personal stories at heritage destinations.

This pictorial reports on the Play Poles prototype that was designed as part of a design ethnography investigating the Internet of Things (IoT) as a resource supporting outdoor play amongst groups of children. We use illustrations and annotations derived from video data and analysis to depict gestures, actions and social interaction that are significant in understanding the qualities of the Poles as a play resource. We argue that simple functions and direct, real-time control can be used by groups of children to support fun and creativity in outdoor play, whilst also highlighting opportunities and challenges in designing IoT play resources.

Public commentary related to reality TV can be overwhelmed by thoughtless reactions and negative sentiments, which often problematically reinforce the cultural stereotyping typically employed in such media. We describe the design, and month-long evaluation, of a mobile "second-screening" application, Screenr, which uses co-voting and live textual tagging to encourage more critical co-viewing in these contexts. Our findings highlight how Screenr supported interrogation of the production qualities and claims of shows, promoted critical discourse around the motivations of programmes, and engaged participants in reflecting on their own assumptions and views. We situate our results within the context of existing second-screening co-viewing work, discuss implications for such technologies to support critical engagement with socio-political media, and provide design implications for future digital technologies in this domain.

We report on a design-led study in the UK that aimed to understand barriers to children (aged 5 to 14 years) 'playing out' in their neighbourhood and explore the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) for supporting children's free play that extends outdoors. The study forms a design ethnography, combining observational fieldwork with design prototyping and co-creative activities across four linked workshops, where we used BBC micro:bit devices to co-create new IoT designs with the participating children. Our collective account contributes new insights about the physical and interactive features of micro:bits that shaped play, gameplay, and social interaction in the workshops, illuminating an emerging design space for supporting 'digital playing out' that is grounded in empirical instances. We highlight opportunities for designing for digital playing out in ways that promote social negotiation, supports varying participation, allows for integrating cultural influences, and accounts for the weaving together of placemaking and play.

The emergence of fake news, as well as filter bubbles and echo chambers, has precipitated renewed attention upon the ways in which news is consumed, shared and reflected and commented upon. While online news comments sections offer space for pluralist and critical discussion, studies suggest that this rarely occurs. Motivated by common practices of annotating, defacing and scribbling on physical newspapers, we built a mobile app -- Newsr -- that supports co-annotation, in the form of graffiti, on online news articles, which we evaluated in-the-wild for one month. We report on how the app encouraged participants to reflect upon the act of choosing news stories, whilst promoting exploration, the critique of content, and the exposure of bias within the writing. Our findings highlight how the re-design of interactive online news experiences can facilitate more directed, "in-the-moment" critique of online news stories as well as encourage readers to expand the range of news content they read.

In this paper, we describe a user-centred design process, where we engaged with 58 adolescents over an 18-month period to design and evaluate a multiplayer mobile game which prompts peer-led interactions around sex and sexuality. Engagement with our design process, and response to our game, has been enthusiastic, highlighting the rich opportunities for HCI to contribute constructively to how HCI may contribute to sexual health in adolescents. Based on our experiences we discuss three lessons learnt: lightweight digital approaches can be extremely successful at facilitating talk among young people about sex; sharing control of the conversation between all stakeholders is a fair and achievable approach; even problematic interactions can be opportunities to talk about sex.

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that 'second screening' practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts.

Pornography is a substantial part of humans' everyday interaction with computers, yet to date the topic has been underconsidered by HCI. Here, we examine some of the common cultural ideals non-experts constructed of a "new" pornographic experience - Virtual Reality (VR) Porn - through use of the "Story Completion Method". Forty five participants completed a story stem about a male character who was about to have his "very first virtual reality porn experience". Through our analysis, we demonstrate a narrative of a "perfect", idealised sexual experience, as well as one which emphasised the imagined "precarious" and dangerous consequences around this technology use. We indicate how the stories reproduced ideals around heteronormativity and hegemonic masculinity, suggesting an agenda of "Designing for Eroticism" as a tactic which could avoid such problematic discourses. We also suggest the opportunities and challenges presented through use of the "Story Completion Method".

Music listening practices are changing. Mobile, networked devices now offer rich opportunities not just for personal music consumption but also for personally broadcasting music and for sharing digital meta-data concerning tastes, preferences and general listening habits. However, experiences of music listening and sharing on the move and how this has been impacted by developments in mobile technology remain under-explored. In this paper we present an empirical study of the sociality of mobile music experiences, "in the wild", using a new location-based mobile music-sharing application (Pocketsong), designed as a technology probe. We report users' experiences of Pocketsong (distilled from interviews), and critically examine the affordances of mobile music applications, the sociality of sharing and "co-listening", and the relationships between digitally-mediated mobile music consumption and self-expression. Based upon this we reflect upon the interaction design challenges of developing mobile music technologies that work in digitally-mediated social spaces.

This paper presents an ethnographic study exploring the role of props and music in dementia care in order to engage participants and inform design. Our findings extend current understandings of participation to reveal that a more nuanced view of participation is required when designing in the dementia context. Our work suggests that participation in music sessions for people with dementia is about touch and intimacy, connection via movement, shifting roles, materiality and using props to disengage. We discuss these themes, their implications for Experience-Centered Design and offer a set of future directions in designing for and with people with dementia that underpin the participation of people with dementia in a meaningful and enriching way.

Women's understandings of their own intimate anatomy has been identified as critical to women's reproductive health and sexual wellbeing. However, talking about it, seeking medical help when necessary as well as examining oneself in order to 'know' oneself is complicated by social-cultural constructions of the vagina, i.e. it is something private, shameful and not to be talked about. In response to this, we designed Labella, an augmented system that supports intimate bodily knowledge and pelvic fitness in women. It combines a pair of underwear and a mobile phone as a tool for embodied intimate self-discovery. In this paper, we describe Labella, and its evaluation with fourteen women, aged 25-63. We show how through situated embodied perception Labella empowers 'looking'. We highlight how the simple act of augmented looking enables the construction of knowledge which ranges from establishing the 'very basics' through to a nuanced understanding of pelvic muscle structure. Finally, we highlight the role of awkwardness and humour in the design of interactions to overcome taboo.

Expressiveness, which we define as the extent to which rich and complex intent can be conveyed through action, is a vital aspect of many human interactions. For instance, paint on canvas is said to be an expressive medium, because it affords the artist the ability to convey multifaceted emotional intent through intricate manipulations of a brush. To date, touch devices have failed to offer users a level of expressiveness in their interactions that rivals that experienced by the painter and those completing other skilled physical tasks. We investigate how data about hand movement -- provided by a motion sensor, similar to those found in many smart watches or fitness trackers -- can be used to expand the expressiveness of touch interactions. We begin by introducing a conceptual model that formalizes a design space of possible expressive touch interactions. We then describe and evaluate Expressy, an approach that uses a wrist-worn inertial measurement unit to detect and classify qualities of touch interaction that extend beyond those offered by today's typical sensing hardware. We conclude by describing a number of sample applications, which demonstrate the enhanced, expressive interaction capabilities made possible by Expressy.

This paper describes three interactive artefacts created for a children's exhibition intended to encourage creativity and allow educational opportunities to emerge naturally through playful exploration. We describe five sensibilities that were used to inform our designs: considering artefacts as resources and scaffolds for imaginative engagement, rewarding extended investment, facilitating requisite unpredictability, encouraging an imaginative orientation to participation, and permitting multiple loci for interaction. Based on observation of how our interactives were used by the public, we discuss how our approach facilitated "open interactions" in a manner that was sensitive to the museum context, favoured a mix of materialities, and manifested a subtle mix of participation and designer autonomy.

We consider the role of making in current HCI design practices and how it may affect the wellbeing of those who participate in these processes. Through an exploration of psychological concepts of wellbeing and their connection to making experiences, we suggest that making can facilitate and support both hedonic and eudemonic facets of wellbeing. We illustrate this in the context of three case studies that engaged people in creative making activities as part of user-centered design processes. Based on our experiences, we argue that researchers ought to be mindful of the potential impact our design processes have on our participants and provide considerations for those designing for and with participants where wellbeing is a concern.

Movement-based digital games typically make it clear whose movement representation belongs to which player. In contrast, we argue that selectively concealing whose movement controls which representation can facilitate engaging play experiences. We call this "innominate movement representation" and explore this opportunity through our game "i-dentity", where players have to guess who makes everyone's controller light up based on his/her movements. Our work reveals five dimensions for the design of innominate movement representation: concealing the association between movement and representation; number of represented movements; number of players with representations; location of representation in relation to the body and technical attributes of representation. We also present five strategies for how innominate representation can be embedded into a play experience. With our work we hope to expand the range of digital movement games.

We detail the design of the Department of Hidden Stories (DoHS), a mobile-based game to support playful digital storytelling among primary school children in public libraries. Through a process of iterative design in collaboration with library staff and children's writers we designed DoHS to support the potential for playful storytelling through interactions with books. A deployment of DoHS with two classes of 8 to 10 years olds as part of their regular library visits revealed insights related to how to balance the expectations of a child-at-play and the requirement to further develop their creative reading and writing skills. Based on our experiences we recommend that designers create playful digitally based activities that encourage children to explore libraries and experience new interactions with physical books.

We consider the role and design of digital technologies in play therapy settings with young children. Through an aggregation of the researcher and practitioner literature, and results of discussions with therapists and counselors, we propose a set of design requirements for digital technologies that support non-directive play within a play therapy context. We explore how to design for these complex requirements through the development and evaluation of Magic Land, a set of four play therapy applications for an interactive tabletop. Based on our experiences we recommend that designers create digital interactive toys, which create opportunities for play that would not normally be possible within the traditional play therapy environment.

Design and digital technologies to support a sense of self and human relationships for people living with dementia are both urgently needed. We present an enquiry into design for dementia facilitated by a public art commission for an adult mental health unit in a hospital in the UK. The interactive art piece was informed by the notion of personhood in dementia that foregrounds the person's social being and interpersonal relationships as sites where self is maintained and constructed. How clients, clients' family members and staff used the piece is reported and insights related to the notions of home, intimacy, possessions and self are presented. The art piece served as window on both dementia and the institution leading to a number of insights and implications for design.