This paper introduces Technology Redux, a new methodological approach in HCI that seeks to reenact past technological experiences in today’s everyday life, critically reflect on the roles and impacts of present technologies, and provoke new perspectives on future directions of technological development. Building on reflections from, BeeperRedux, a case study that recreated the 1990s beeper as a smartphone application, we present four practical strategies for enacting Technology Redux: (1) reproducing experiences beyond replicating past technologies, (2) balancing friction for provocation and everyday integration, (3) integrating personal narratives as research resources, and (4) surfacing the sociocultural and infrastructural contexts. We argue that this methodology uniquely integrates the perspectives and strengths of the historicist approach, speculative design, and research products, introducing a critical and actionable research practice for HCI.

Group recommendation systems (GRS) provide personalized recommendations to multiple users. While GRS has garnered attention as a social catalyst that can foster social interactions among users, how to design GRS to effectively support such experiences remains underexplored. To address this gap, we conducted an empirical study of a YouTube video GRS involving 23 participants across 8 groups over 16 days. Using experience prototyping combined with a diary study and follow-up interviews, we investigated users’ perceptions of three design attributes of GRS: algorithmic controllability, algorithmic transparency, and behavioral visibility. Our findings reveal the social experiences enabled by these design attributes, as well as the challenges and concerns that emerged. Based on these findings, we conceptualize five roles of GRS as a social catalyst (i.e., Hinter, Connector, Probe, Homing Pigeon, and Provocateur ) and suggest design considerations for leveraging GRS as a novel design material to facilitate meaningful social interactions.

Creating a cast of characters by attending to their relational dynamics is a critical aspect of most long-form storywriting. However, our formative study (N=14) reveals that writers struggle to envision new characters that could influence existing ones, balance similarities and differences among characters, and intricately flesh out their relationships. Based on these observations, we designed Constella , an LLM-based multi-agent tool that supports storywriters’ interconnected character creation process. Constella suggests related characters (FRIENDS DISCOVERY feature), reveals the inner mindscapes of several characters simultaneously (JOURNALS feature), and manifests relationships through inter-character responses (COMMENTS feature). Our 7–8 day deployment study with storywriters (N=11) shows that Constella enabled the creation of expansive communities composed of related characters, facilitated the comparison of characters’ thoughts and emotions, and deepened writers’ understanding of character relationships. We conclude by discussing how multi-agent interactions can help distribute writers’ attention and effort across the character cast.

On-demand ride-pooling (ODRP) services are a new alternative modes of transportation that have recently emerged due to technological advancements.While algorithmic management plays a crucial role in ODRP services and can create complex workplace dynamics, the experiences of ODRP workers remain underexplored in the HCI field.To address this gap, we interviewed 16 drivers of Shucle, an ODRP service in South Korea.We examined the drivers' detailed work practices, focusing on the perceived challenges of working under algorithmic management and the perceived benefits and necessity of algorithmic management.This paper provides empirical evidence of the impact of algorithmic management on ODRP drivers' work environments and discusses the implications of our findings for supporting algorithmic workplaces in ODRP services.By positioning ODRP drivers as company employees embedded within a vast, dynamic traffic environment, our study extends algorithmic management scholarship beyond gig work and other algorithmic work contexts, offering fresh insights into how autonomy and accountability are configured across algorithmic workplaces.

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) now allows users to actively interact with conversational recommendation systems (CRS) and build their own personalized recommendation services tailored to their unique needs and goals. This experience offers users a significantly higher level of controllability compared to traditional RS, enabling an entirely new dimension of recommendation experiences. Building on this context, this study explored the unique experiences that LLM-powered CRS can provide compared to traditional RS. Through a three-week diary study with 12 participants using custom GPTs for music recommendations, we found that LLM-powered CRS can (1) help users clarify implicit needs, (2) support unique exploration, and (3) facilitate a deeper understanding of musical preferences. Based on these findings, we discuss the new design space enabled by LLM-powered CRS and highlight its potential to support more personalized, user-driven recommendation experiences.

Smart home devices increasingly aim to offer personalized experiences based on individual usage patterns and preferences. However, individuals in multi-person households often find themselves navigating daily life by coordinating with other members. This article aims to understand how users align their preferences for shared technology and their expectations for future smart homes in such contexts. To this end, we conducted a 7-day diary study and in-depth interviews to observe how members of multi-person households coordinate their preferences in everyday life. We discovered that members’ device usage is not solely influenced by their own preferences, but is significantly affected by the preferences and social contexts of other members. We identified three strategies for coordinating preferences: coordination according to shared priorities, coordination according to shared rules, and coordination for relationships. Participants expected future smart homes to support their coordination needs. We propose design implications for multi-user smart homes that support coordination.

Designing user experiences for group recommendation systems (GRS) is challenging, requiring a nuanced understanding of the influence of social interactions between users. Using Spotify Blend as a real-world case of music GRS, we conducted empirical studies to investigate intricate social interactions among South Korean users in GRS. Through a preliminary survey about Blend experiences in general, we narrowed the focus for the main study to relationships between two users who are acquainted or close. Building on this, we conducted a 21-day diary study and interviews with 30 participants (15 pairs) to probe more in-depth interpersonal dynamics within Blend. Our findings reveal that users engaged in implicit social interactions, including tacit understanding of their companions and indirect communication. We conclude by discussing the newly discovered value of GRS as a social catalyst, along with design attributes and challenges for the social experiences it mediates.

Nowadays, many mobile instant messenger (MIM) users employ stickers to express their emotions. Due to the increase in the variety of stickers, many MIM platforms have begun to offer sticker recommendation services, which suggest appropriate stickers based on the context of conversations. Although sticker recommendation services need to consider users' subtle social and psychological needs from the perspective that stickers are an alternative communication language, few attempts have been made to explore this area. Consequently, we investigated sticker usage practices through a qualitative study with 18 KakaoTalk users in South Korea. Based on the results of this study, we revealed user's three common considerations in sticker usage experiences and discussed the design implications for sticker recommendation services in MIM.

Intelligent systems learn and evolve depending on what kinds of input are given and how people actually use them after deployment. While such a characteristic may be a troubling property for AI user experience designers, it also imbues an intelligent system with an open-ended quality, empowering end-users to ‘design’ their own system in use to achieve more desired experiences. In light of this, we conducted in-depth interviews with 16 users of various AI-based everyday recommender systems, investigating how people design their AI user experiences in actual use contexts. Exploring people’s current experiences of adopting and adapting those systems to achieve their own desired experiences, we discovered three styles of end-user design of their experiences: teaching, resisting, and repurposing. We end with a discussion of the implications of our findings, recognizing end-users’ motivation to challenge a prescribed experience of an intelligent system.

Sleep hygiene is a recommendation to help improve sleep quality; many persuasive technologies have been designed in human–computer interaction (HCI) studies to support sleep hygiene routines. However, a critical challenge is that users intentionally do not follow the recommendations because these often conflict with the user’s preferences or circumstances. To overcome this problem, we propose an alternative interaction strategy by which users can negotiate their sleep hygiene activities. Instead of emphasizing idealized rules for users, goals mutually agreed between the user and the system may support adherence to sleep hygiene. To explore the potential and experience of negotiating sleep hygiene goals, users and design researchers engaged in improvisational role-playing to simulate negotiations. We found that negotiation could support positive attitudes and self-efficacy in adhering to sleep hygiene practices. We discuss the balance between flexibility and authority as the primary characteristics of negotiation, and how to design negotiation-based interactive systems.

Sensors and actuators are crucial components of a do-it-yourself (DIY) smart home system that enables users to construct smart home features successfully. In addition, machine learning (ML) (e.g., ML-intensive camera sensors) can be applied to sensor technology to increase its accuracy. Although camera sensors are often utilized in homes, research on user experiences with DIY smart home systems employing camera sensors is still in its infancy. This research investigates novel user experiences while constructing DIY smart home features using an ML-intensive camera sensor in contrast to commonly used IoT sensors. Thus, we conducted a seven-day field diary study with 12 families who were given a DIY smart home kit. Here, we assess the five characteristics of the camera sensor as well as the potential and challenges of utilizing the camera sensor in the DIY smart home and discuss the opportunities to address existing DIY smart home issues.

With advances in artificial intelligence technology, Voice-based Conversational Agents (VCAs) can now imitate human abilities, sometimes almost indistinguishably from humans. However, concerns have been raised that too much perceived similarity can trigger threats and fears among users. This raises a question: Should VCAs be able to imitate humans perfectly? To address this, we explored what influences the negative aspects of user experience in human-like VCAs. We conducted a qualitative exploratory study to elicit participants’ perceptions and feelings of human-like VCAs through comparable video prototypes of human–agent conversation and human–human conversation. We discovered that the dialogues of the human-likeness outside of the expressed purpose of a VCA and expressions pretending to come from a human identity could lead to negative experiences with VCAs. Based on our findings, we discussed design directions for overcoming potential issues of human imitation.

Techno-spiritual practices refer to the use of digital technologies to support various spiritual activities, such as scripture reading. While prior human-computer interaction studies largely focus on understanding techno-spiritual practices in both personal and ministry environments, there is a lack of design research that explores novel design opportunities, based on longitudinal field deployment. As an important techno-spiritual practice, this work focuses on scripture reading and investigates the design space of "social scripture reading," as it is often organized into small groups for successful behavior maintenance. We designed and evaluated BibleCell, a social scripture reading tool that supports personalized reading plans, scripture reading, and social sharing. After the third year of deployment, we performed a two-month user study in Korean Protestant churches to deepen our understanding of techno-spiritual practices in social contexts via in-depth interviews (n = 27). We report the major themes of social techno-spiritual practices, such as social motivators, social interaction patterns, and leadership roles. We discuss our findings using a novel design concept of social-spiritual awareness that considers both the social and spiritual aspects of interactions in social computing systems.

Interactions with voice-based conversational agents (VCAs) in non-humanoid forms are becoming increasingly pervasive, and researches on non-humanoid VCAs engaging diverse human traits have been conducted. However, there have never been studies employing living body's physiological states to be expressed solely through the voice of such VCAs yet. As physiological expressions of such VCAs can have potential for manifesting health-related issues in a human-like way, we selected healthcare scenarios as a case for exploring novel user experiences that they can induce. We conducted design workshops for identifying design considerations and design opportunities for the physiologically expressible VCAs in the healthcare service domain. Following these findings, we designed the new concept of physiologically expressible healthcare VCAs and conducted a Wizard-of-Oz user study. Finally, we summarize the unique user experiences on physiologically expressible VCA's healthcare services and user perceptions of its physiological expressions, and discuss design implications for physiologically expressible VCAs.

Intelligent systems in everyday lives learn about their users to tailor services over time. However, these systems are often designed with little consideration of user agency on their learning processes, hindering users from taking full advantage of the systems. In this paper, we propose Teaching-Learning Interaction (TLI) as a new form of interaction that affords user agency by letting users reflectively shepherd an intelligent system’s manner of learning. Given such agency, users will be able to better personalize services for themselves. We first draw on Schön’s notion of knowing-in-action and reflective practice to theoretically ground our concept. We then present the resulting definition of TLI and three design qualities, which are further concretized with three design examples. We end with discussion on the implications of TLI for HCI design.

Matching the autonomous vehicle’s (AV) driving style to its user’s preference is core to a satisfactory user experience. The recent HCI community has undertaken a significant amount of research to understand user-preferred driving styles in AVs. Due to its multifaceted nature, understanding these driving preferences is difficult unless users take roles in an adaptive system and share their needs explicitly. However, there is a lack of a proper channel for users to express their driving-style needs in AVs. To bridge this gap, we suggest a user’s preferred driving-style guidance using voice as a novel input channel for human-centric AV control. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz driving study on real roads, aiming to explore the guiding experience with the AV agent to reflect their driving-style preferences. This paper presents the value of driving-style guidance along with its burden to users, and concludes with its implications in designing a better AV-guiding experience.

Voice-based Conversational Agents (VCA) have served as personal assistants that support individuals with special needs. Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may also benefit from VCAs to deal with their everyday needs and challenges, ranging from self-care to social communications. In this study, we explored how VCAs could encourage adolescents with ASD in navigating various aspects of their daily lives through the two-week use of VCAs and a series of participatory design workshops. Our findings demonstrated that VCAs could be an engaging, empowering, emancipating tool that supports adolescents with ASD to address their needs, personalities, and expectations, such as promoting self-care skills, regulating negative emotions, and practicing conversational skills. We propose implications of using off-the-shelf technologies as a personal assistant to ASD users in Assistive Technology design. We suggest design implications for promoting positive opportunities while mitigating the remaining challenges of VCAs for adolescents with ASD.

There are needs for pen interaction on a laptop, and the market sees many pen-enabled laptop products. Many of these laptops can be transformed into tablets, when pen interaction is needed. In a real situation, however, a workflow often requires both keyboard and pen interactions, and such a convertible feature may not be effective. In this study, we introduce MirrorPad, a novel interface device contained in a laptop for direct pen interaction. It is both a normal touchpad and a viewport for pen interaction with a mirrored region on the screen. We report findings and decisions obtained from the design iterations that we conducted with users to refine MirrorPad toward the final design. In the user study, MirrorPad showed the same performance as that of the laptop configuration during keyboard interaction and a performance similar to that of the tablet configuration during pen interaction. The user study results confirmed that MirrorPad effectively supports a workflow, which requires interspersed keyboard and pen interactions, thereby achieving its initial goal.

AI assistants that use a voice user interface (VUI), such as AI speakers, have become popular in family homes. However, it is still unclear what roles the AI speaker can support within the family unit. We investigated the roles of an AI speaker as a family-shared technology. By conducting a one-week participatory user study, we discovered that family members' co-ownership toward the AI speaker was the key in the development of its family-oriented roles. Our findings showed seven domains of user expectations on these roles, and we realized that all the expectations can be represented as family cohesion. In addition, privacy awareness was emphasized regarding personal supports. Finally, we discuss a new perspective for AI speaker design and offer two suggestions: 1) leveraging human-likeness to develop its potential roles of supporting the unit of a family and 2) interpreting the home context to seamlessly connect family and personal supporting roles.

Intelligent agents have become prevalent in everyday IT products and services. To improve an agent's knowledge of a user and the quality of personalized service experience, it is important for the agent to cooperate with the user (e.g., asking users to provide their information and feedback). However, few works inform how to support such user-agent co-performance from a human-centered perspective. To fill this gap, we devised Co-Performing Agent, a Wizard-of-Oz-based research probe of an agent that cooperates with a user to learn by helping users to have a partnership mindset. By incorporating the probe, we conducted a two-month exploratory study, aiming to understand how users experience co-performing with their agent over time. Based on the findings, this paper presents the factors that affected users' co-performing behaviors and discusses design implications for supporting constructive co-performance and building a resilient user-agent partnership over time.

People receive a tremendous number of messages through mobile instant messaging (MIM), which generates crowded notifications. This study highlights our attempt to create a new notification rule to reduce this crowdedness, which can be recognized by both senders and recipients. We developed an MIM app that provides only one notification per conversation session, which is a group of consecutive messages distinguished based on a ten-minute silence period. Through the two-week field study, 20,957 message logs and interview data from 17 participants revealed that MIM notifications affect not only the recipients' experiences before opening the app but also the entire conversation experience, including that of the senders. The new notification rule created new social norms for the participants' use of MIM. We report themes about the changes in the MIM experience, which will expand the role of notifications for future MIM apps.

Nowadays, mobile instant messaging (MIM) is a necessity for our private and public lives, but it has also been the cause of stress. In South Korea, MIM stress has become a serious social problem. To understand this stress, we conducted four focus groups with 20 participants under MIM stress. We initially discovered that MIM stress relates to how people perceive the territory in MIM. We then applied proxemics-the theory of human use of space-to the thematic analysis as the rationale. The data revealed two main themes: too close and too crowded. The participants were stressed due to design features that let strangers or crowds into their MIM applications and forced them to interact and share their status with them. Based on this finding, we propose a set of implications for designing anti-stress MIM applications.

The adoption of self-tracking services to improve health-related behavior is increasing. Although psychologists claim that thinking about the future has a motivational impact on current behavior and cognition, few studies have explored using future forecast in self-tracking services. In this paper, we explore how future forecast information can be used in the design of self-tracking services. We conducted a four-week study that qualitatively investigated 11 participants' perceptions of and practices with future forecast information. Participants used the FutureSelf app that we developed, which forecasts dieters' future weights and expected goal achievement rates based on their current behavior. The findings reveal that predicting future weight based on prior performance induced participants to imagine their future selves and reminded them of their ultimate goals. In fact, the predictions became the participants' primary source of motivation. We also suggest design implications for self-tracking services that forecast users' future statuses.

Online document collaboration tools, such as Google Docs, offer designers different ways of communicating and working collaboratively compared to face-to-face interaction. In this paper, we attempt to explore the possibilities and limitations of using an online document collaboration tool for design problem-solving activities. A design workshop study was conducted to compare using Google Docs during a design task to face-to-face collaboration. As a result, we found different influences of exploiting an online document collaboration tool and face-to-face interaction on the design process, and identified the properties that afford different characteristics of design problem-solving activity. Based on these findings, we discuss the implications of using an online document collaboration tool and face-to-face interaction for collaborative design.

Everyday smartphone use gives rise to a new kind of user experience that is characterized by unplanned use. Exploring spontaneous uses promises to improve our understanding of both the deeper integration of the smartphone into mundane activities, as well as the smartphone's potential for distraction and interruption. Therefore, we studied the user experience of unplanned smartphone use to unpack its experience qualities. For capturing unplanned use from a first-person perspective, 36 participants each produced two hours of continuous video recordings with wearable cameras. The findings introduced the experience quality of'timelessness,' a feeling that unplanned smartphone use is a series of unrelated moments, lacking a coherent sense of past, present, and future. Unplanned use usually leaves no memory of what it was, presents no attributes of what it is, and projects no endings of what it will be. The study contributes a theoretical framework of unplanned use for experience design.

Recently, self-tracking devices such as wearable activity trackers have become more available to end users. While these emerging products are imbued with new characteristics in terms of human-computer interaction, it is still unclear how to describe and design for user experience in such devices. In this paper, we present a three-week field study, which aimed to unfold users' experience with wearable activity trackers. Drawing from Knapp's model of interaction stages in interpersonal relationship development, we propose three stages of relationship development between users and self-tracking devices: initiation & experimentation, intensifying & integration, and stagnation & termination. We highlight the challenges in each stage and design opportunities for future self-tracking devices.

Prototypes and prototyping have had a long and important history in the HCI community and have played a highly significant role in creating technology that is easier and more fulfilling to use. Yet, as focus in HCI is expanding to investigate complex matters of human relationships with technology over time in the intimate and contested contexts of everyday life, the notion of a 'prototype' may not be fully sufficient to support these kinds of inquiries. We propose the research product as an extension and evolution of the research prototype to support generative inquiries in this emerging research area. We articulate four interrelated qualities of research products inquiry-driven, finish, fit, and independent and draw on these qualities to describe and analyze five different yet related design research cases we have collectively conducted over the past six years. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and opportunities for crafting research products and the implications they suggest for future design-oriented HCI research.

The evolution of SNS applications has focused on the increasing pace of communication. Accordingly, adopting pause moment design for the SNS domain becomes significant, considering its worth for mental well-being and diversity of experience. Nonetheless, the vision is currently controversial, as it is lacking in attempts to examine the worth of pause moment design for SNS communication. Therefore, we discussed the benefits of pause moment design as an SNS application, based on the case of Ripening Room. From observation, we have identified three benefits of pause moment design; preserving room for solitude, expanding time experience, and providing additional indirect cues for communication. Nevertheless, the benefits also imply limitations of the current design, thus require following attempts to adopt a pause moment design for the SNS domain.

Recently, a great amount of conversation is taking place through mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications. The emergence of mobile messengers has enabled people to spend significant time in MIM, dwelling with close people. To investigate how this persistent use of MIM shaped the roles and meanings of MIM chatrooms, we conducted semi-structured interviews with ten users of KakaoTalk, one of the most popular MIM applications in South Korea. By understanding how participants determine the notion of centrality in MIM, we discovered three functional regions, namely, primary, secondary, and tertiary regions, which respectively support different functions not only in communication, but also in social interaction with various types of relationships: performing everyday life, connecting to the maintained social capital, and connecting to the expired relationship. Based on the valued meanings and user behaviors in those regions, we highlight two approaches that would trigger a new perspective in the design of messaging applications.

People become increasingly influenced by others in changing and maintaining health behaviors. Along with the advancement of persuasive technology and social networking technologies, the place where social interaction occurs has expanded. As a result, mediators who influence an individual's behavior change can come from diverse social channels. However, little work exists on what roles the mediators have and how differently the mediators motivate and affect the maintenance of health behavior changes of users through various social channels. To investigate this, we conducted interviews with 13 participants who use a running exercise application for maintaining their health behavior changes. This study reveals the roles of mediators from three different social channels, which are the social feature in the application, general social media, and the agent feature in the application. Mediators from the application could influence participants' health behavior change either positively or negatively according to the level of intimacy and the similarity of the physical condition. Social media mediators influence participants' social face and support their health behavior changes by keeping participants in countenance. Lastly, the agent mediator of the application provides continuous reinforcement to participants for maintaining their health behavior changes.

Do-it-yourself (DIY)-style smart home products enable users to create their own smart homes by installing sensors and actuators. DIY smart home products are a potential solution to current problems related to home automation products, such as inflexible user controls and high costs of installation. Although the expected user experience of DIY smart home products is different from that of previous home automation products, research on DIY smart home products is still in its early stages. In this paper, we report a 3-week in situ observational study involving eight households. The results suggest six stages of the DIY smart home usage cycle and design implications for improving the user experience of DIY smart home products.

This study proposed some considerations for designing social media to encourage self-reflection of users, referring to rationales of exemplary case, --Ripening Room?. Ripening Room provides ripening time, a delay period between the time of writing and sharing posts, and a ripening score to evaluate users' self-reflection. To give insights for the design a preliminary exploration was conducted on university students about their perceptions and experience of self-reflection in social media. To evaluate the effect of Ripening Room's design, an empirical study on Ripening Room was conducted. Participants mentioned that the features of Ripening Room inspired them to self-reflect upon their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. From the findings of the empirical study, further implications were suggested.

Somaesthetics has been adapted as a theoretical foundation for explaining the aesthetic experience of interaction. However, the practice of somaesthetics remains relatively unexplored in HCI, and it has potential to improve the ideation process of interactive product design by improving designers and developers' sensibility of haptic, dynamic, and invisible qualities of movements. We introduce somaesthetic reflection, a somatic introspection method in pragmatic somaesthetics, and explore its impact on the ideation through a practical workshop. This study revealed that somaesthetic reflection helps the participants experience and recognize unconscious movements and coordination of movements, which further contributes to discovery of design issues in the ideation, and more effective experience prototyping of interaction with moving products. The characteristics of the design approaches found in this study are discussed.

Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. However, what if unfinished ideas work? This CHI paper proposes a new design space we call non-finito products for the HCI community. This new design space is about intentionally unfinished products and how they foster new creations by end-users as they are actually used to help people solve their own problems. The central idea comes from the background of the growing complexity associated with IT advancement and from the new way of dealing with it, with the assistance of user creativity in the actual use of the products. This paper begins with the exploration of non-finito products as a new design space for the end-user's creativity in the personal user experience. We then defined and proposed non-finito products. We discussed three case studies that will help to understand the design space of non-finito products, and we framed the new design space by revealing the beneficial contexts and values. Finally, we suggested the implications of designing non-finito products. We believe that non-finito products will open a new design space in HCI, prompt a new means of replacing value-destroying complexity with value-creating version, and help to make a product better fit to user experience.

People worldwide are increasingly acquiring collections of virtual possessions. While virtual possessions have become ubiquitous, little work exists on how people value and form attachments to these things. To investigate, we conducted a study with 48 young adults from South Korea, Spain and the United States. The study probed on participants' perceived value of their virtual possessions as compared to their material things, and the comparative similarities and differences across cultures. Findings show that young adults live in unfinished spaces and that they often experience a sense of fragmentation when trying to integrate their virtual possessions into their lives. These findings point to several design opportunities, such as tools for life story-oriented archiving, and insights on better forms of Cloud storage.

Advances in dynamic gesture recognition technologies now make it possible to investigate freehand input techniques. This study tried to understand how users manipulate digital content on a distant screen by hand gesture interaction in a living room environment. While there have been many existing studies that investigate freehand input techniques, we developed and applied a novel study methodology based on a combination of both an existing user elicitation study and conventional Wizard-of-Oz study that involved another non-technical user for providing feedback. Through the study, many useful issues and implications for making freehand gesture interaction design more natural in a living room environment were generated which have not been covered in previous works. Furthermore, we could observe how the initial user-defined gestures are changed over time.

In this paper, we suggest interactivity, which defines dynamic and invisible characteristics of an interactive system, as a medium for self-expression in an online communication environment. Since existing means of self-expression are visual- or text-oriented, they cover only a part of one's real self. Interactivity, however, is invisible, but still evokes emotional experiences depending on its value. Therefore, we expected that one's interactivity expression customization would also represent the different dimensions of one's characteristics. This study aims to explore the possibility of interactivity expressions as a new way of self-expression in an online communication environment. By conducting a user study with a social website prototype, namely, iSpace, in which each user's personal site can be distinguished by their different interactivity expressions, this study provides understandings of rationales and patterns of interactivity expressions, and design implications which we expect to inspire designers to consider them strategically in their design practices.

As a new approach to interactive product development, we found possibilities in interactions themselves as the starting point of a product development, and propose a concept of interaction-driven design. We focused on the movements in interactions, such as users' input behaviors and feedback movements from the system's output. In this paper, design patterns and their characteristics for three different interactive product development approaches, including our newly proposed one, were examined through an ideation workshop: 1) user-driven product development, 2) technology-driven product development, and 3) interaction-driven product development. We were able to see that results for the development of interactive products differed depending on the combining order or the linking patterns of factors such as form, function, and interaction. Interaction-driven product development opens up a wider range of linking possibilities compared to the other two approaches.

Unlike lab environments, the existing environment is not built for smart applications, but rather should be "upgraded" to support new technologies. The result of this process is called the "accidentally smart home". We developed Clipoid, an augmentable wireless technology toolkit for supporting the development of an "accidentally smart home" environment. We observed the real user context (static, moving) with Clipoid. We present a guideline for developing an augmentation toolkit, and identify human needs of close proximity physical interaction and multiple users-public platforms.

Statistical graphics on the web such as a tag cloud visually represent statistical data which are generated by website users. While sighted people can scan the latest information through the dynamic changes of statistical graphics, blind people, who cannot perceive them, lose opportunities to keep up to date in this quickly-changing society. In order to enable blind people to experience socially-generated statistical graphics, we propose a new assistive device, namely, Handscope, which translates statistical graphics on websites into simple height changes of its haptic pole. We conducted a two-phase user study with blind people in order to test its usability and explore its effects on the quality of blind users' web experiences. The results show the meaningful contribution of Handscope in extending the area of blind people's web experiences.

We propose a new perspective, seeing interactivity that is the immaterial part of an interactive artifact as something concretely describable and perceivable as we do with physical materials. In order to examine the validity of this proposal, we extracted a set of interactivity attributes to be used as a design language for thinking and describing interactivity in a new way, and conducted an online survey with 14 Flash prototypes representing pairs of values of 7 interactivity attributes we extracted. The result showed that all the interactivity attributes were significant, and participants experienced distinctive and meaningful emotional effects for different interactivity attributes.

This study describes preliminary research for designing a growing robot. To explore the interaction between a human and an object that changes physically through its growth, focus group interviews were conducted with participants who kept pets, plants, and a plant-like product. An appropriate target model for designing a growing robot, the value of raising living things, and the features of interaction that induce affinity were examined.

Computers designed for single use are often appropriated suboptimally when used by small colocated groups working together. Our research investigates whether shareable interfaces—that are designed for more than one user to interact with–can facilitate more equitable participation in colocated group settings compared with single user displays. We present a conceptual framework that characterizes Shared Information Spaces (SISs) in terms of how they constrain and invite participation using different entry points. An experiment was conducted that compared three different SISs: a physical-digital set-up (least constrained), a multitouch tabletop (medium), and a laptop display (most constrained). Statistical analyses showed there to be little difference in participation levels between the three conditions other than a predictable lack of equity of control over the interface in the laptop condition. However, detailed qualitative analyses revealed more equitable participation took place in the physical-digital condition in terms of verbal utterances over time. Those who spoke the least contributed most to the physical design task. The findings are discussed in relation to the conceptual framework and, more generally, in terms of how to select, design, and combine different display technologies to support collaborative activities.

Pervasive technologies, such as shared interactive surfaces and mobile devices, are beginning to be used to support a diversity of collaborative user experiences. Compared with fixed PC applications, however, they are more difficult to evaluate. Of importance, it requires understanding the context of use through capturing and analyzing different types of data (e.g., conversations, gestures, movements) and re‐representing them at different levels of abstraction. This can make the analysis complex and unwieldy, requiring teams of analysts to manage it. A new approach to managing the complexity of collaborative analysis is presented, where an integrated physical and conceptual space have been co-designed to allow design teams to readily share and transfer their interpretations of data through preserving the contextual information. A case study is described showing how a collaborative analysis approach enabled small groups of designers to work together to interpret and further analyze a variety of data.

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.