The field of Sports Human-Computer Interaction (SportsHCI) investigates interaction design to support a physically active human being. Despite growing interest and dissemination of SportsHCI literature over the past years, many publications still focus on solving specific problems in a given sport. We believe in the benefit of generating fundamental knowledge for SportsHCI more broadly to advance the field as a whole. To achieve this, we aim to identify the grand challenges in SportsHCI, which can help researchers and practitioners in developing a future research agenda. Hence, this paper presents a set of grand challenges identified in a five-day workshop with 22 experts who have previously researched, designed, and deployed SportsHCI systems. Addressing these challenges will drive transformative advancements in SportsHCI, fostering better athlete performance, athlete-coach relationships, spectator engagement, but also immersive experiences for recreational sports or exercise motivation, and ultimately, improve human well-being.

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.

HCI has a long history of designing to support family life, despite this little is known about the unique needs of adoptive families. Though work has explored the role of photos, and photo sharing in the family home, this does not take account of the essential role of photos in supporting the well-being of adopted children. We report on a Research through Design (RtD) project investigating how adoptive parents communicate life story, which is essential to a child's sense of identity. In this pictorial we show the role of photos and visual communication in enabling core aspects of communicative openness between parent and child, as derived from interviews with adopters about their child's life story book. We conclude by discussing the need for visual guidelines and tools to support a more nuanced use of photos and illustrations.

Abstract Personal informatics technologies support the collection of and reflection on personal data, but enabling people to learn from and act on this data is still an on-going challenge. Sharing and discussing data is one way people can learn from it, but as yet, little research explores how peer discourses around data can shape understandings and promote action. We ran 3 workshops with 5-week follow-ups, giving 18 people the opportunity to swap their data and discuss it with another person. We found that these workshops helped them to recontextualise and to better understand their data, identify new strategies for changing their behaviour and motivated people to commit to changes in the future. These findings have implications for how personal informatics tools could help people identify opportunities for change and feel motivated to try out new strategies.

Many companies would like to redesign their workspaces to make them more pleasant and even fun places to work in. An assumption is it will result in social and economic benefits. However, it can be difficult to achieve because of cost, level of disruption and regulations. We present an alternative approach that provides an injection of playfulness into "drab" office buildings. A lightweight technology intervention was designed - Mood Squeezer - that asks people to reflect on their mood by squeezing a colored ball from a box set. The squeezes are mirrored back as an aggregate colorful visualization on a public floor display. An in-the-wild study showed how this intervention was successful at getting people to squeeze their mood, leading to a diversity of conversations throughout the building. We discuss how this lightweight approach to office augmentation can provide new opportunities for opening up a "closed" workplace.

Activity trackers are increasingly popular, but they have high levels of abandonment and little evidence exists to suggest why this is. This paper explores barriers to engagement with activity trackers. We extend previous research by not only characterising the barriers users experienced, such as tracking accuracy and device aesthetics, but also by reporting the workarounds they created. We discuss implications for the design of activity tracking systems by reflecting on these workarounds, the potential for activity tracker design to help overcome existing barriers, and how customisation could play a role.

Very little research has concurrently explored the influence of both physical space and social context (or place) on the way people engage with a public interactive display. We addressed this issue with a novel approach: studying how people engaged with the same interactive installation in ten situations with varying spatial and social properties. The main finding across these studies is that place trumps space: a conducive social context could overcome a poor physical space and encourage interaction; conversely, an inappropriate social context could inhibit interaction in spaces that might normally facilitate engagement. We discuss this finding in terms of the salience of the display within the space, the visibility of incidental interactions with the installation, the different understandings of place that people can have in the same location and the role of emergent champions and comperes in encouraging interaction.