Robotic welding path programming is commonly framed as a technical problem addressed through expert-oriented tools. This pictorial presents a Research-through-Design (RtD) exploration of an Augmented Reality (AR) interface that allows operators to define seam and tack welding paths directly on physical workpieces using gestural input, while receiving immediate visual feedback on robotic reachability derived from inverse kinematics. This pictorial documents a series of design interactions in which system was progressively refined through deployment and designerly reflection, and examining how spatial interaction and infrastructural breakdowns can influence human understanding of robotic constraints during welding path planning. Through annotated images and reflective accounts of system use, this pictorial contributes (1) an AR-based path planning workflow that supports both seam and tack welding, and (2) design knowledge on how computational and visual feedback mediates embodied human-robot negotiation.

This article presents a human-centred design study examining how low-fidelity and embodied prototyping methods can elicit design-relevant knowledge for Robotic-Assisted Surgery (RAS). Focusing on femoral cement removal in Revision Total Hip Arthroplasty (rTHA), we conducted a design-led workshop involving a senior orthopaedic surgeon with expertise in complex revision cases, a surgical assistant, a robotics engineer from an industry partner developing orthopaedic surgical robots and a team of design researchers. Through scenario-based roleplay, task enactment and spatial configuration activities, we surfaced tacit, embodied and situated insights into anatomical factors, instrument design, surgeon–robot ergonomics, shared control models and operating theatre layout. These findings highlight challenges and opportunities for integrating robotic systems into complex surgical procedures and demonstrate how collaborative exploratory prototyping can support early stage reflection and interdisciplinary knowledge exchange. Rather than validating a specific solution, the study contributes both a transferable methodological approach for eliciting design insights in high-risk, highly constrained environments and formative insights into the design of RAS systems for rTHA.

This research investigates the application of tangible and embodied prototyping methods integrated with virtual simulation in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). We present the development of the “kinematic puppet,” a reliable, reusable, adaptable, and accessible prototyping tool designed to facilitate stakeholder engagement in early-stage HRI research and development without requiring significant financial or time investments. The potential of this methodological approach is illustrated through a formative co-design workshop in Robotic Assisted Surgery (RAS), where the kinematic puppet, simple props and a low-fidelity anatomical model enabled stakeholders to externalise tacit knowledge through role-play scenarios. The case study suggests that combining physical and virtual approaches can support stakeholders in expressing concrete ideas for improving or changing the interaction, making abstract concepts tangible, with virtual simulation enabling rich data capture for further design development. This work contributes to the rapidly expanding toolbox of design approaches in HRI.

In contrast to traditional industrial robots, collaborative robots are developed with the intention of allowing for close-proximity physical interaction between humans and robots. Current definitions of collaborative robots provide a pragmatic starting point for establishing safety guidelines, choosing operating parameters, and implementing organisational changes, but remain predicated on technological conceptions that prioritise a conscious split between people and robots, with the surrounding world as merely a physical site for interaction. In this paper, we take a postphenomenological perspective on robots in an investigation of human-world relations that robots can give rise to. This perspective can help elucidate the nature of such relations in a design process. Our investigation is anchored in an 8-month research study that aimed to, first, identify opportunities for a robot integration within a medical manufacturing facility and, second, facilitate a design and implementation process of a proof-of-concept robotic system in collaboration with workers. The paper contributes with an empirically anchored postphenomenological analysis of how human-world relations played out in the design process of a collaborative robotic system. Finally, we elaborate on the utility and limitations of a postphenomenological lens for design research.

Collaborative robots (cobots) are increasingly employed in manufacturing to enhance productivity and efficiency, particularly by performing repetitive or precise tasks, allowing workers to focus on more complex activities. However, the growing adoption of cobots in dynamic environments, such as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), poses challenges in designing flexible and user-friendly interaction models. This research addresses these challenges by integrating tangible interaction and Extended Reality (XR) technologies to develop innovative interaction methods for human-robot collaboration in metalworking. The tangible interaction leverages users' familiarity with physical objects, while XR provides immersive, real-time visual overlays to enhance task execution and decision-making. A co-design methodology is employed, involving metalworkers, XR designers, and roboticists, to ensure the system meets user needs. The study progresses through four phases: contextual inquiry, co-design workshops, system development, and user testing. Preliminary findings highlight the potential of XR-enabled tangible interaction to improve safety, efficiency, and intuitiveness in cobot applications. Future work aims to refine prototypes, evaluate scalability, and explore broader industrial applications, paving the way for safer and more effective human-robot collaboration systems.

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) has many potential benefits to workers in various sectors but also inherently changes work practices, processes, and ways of thinking. Lupetti et al. [2] argue that design techniques and processes are needed to bridge the gap between the technical research driving HRC approaches and the sociocultural reality and needs of end-users. This demo presents the “kinematic puppet,” a novel, cost-effective, modular, and adaptable tangible interface to facilitate embodied exploration of robotic movements and interactions through roleplaying and Wizard-of-Oz prototyping, enabling the exploration of HRC concepts without requiring advanced skills in robotic programming and supporting more human-centered design in HRC.

This paper presents an account of using embodied composition as an approach to engage people in imagining robotic sound space. Embodied composition entails using bodily movements to produce a sequence of sounds. Semantic-free sound can play a useful communicative role in human-robot interaction. This includes robotic consequential sounds, i.e., sounds that robots inevitably make when moving, and the sonification of this movement. We bring together these topics and present a participatory, embodied approach that enables in-person investigation of robot consequential sound and movement sonification. We present three key insights about the approach based on three consecutive studies with a total of 29 participants. First, embodied composition engages participants' imagination of robotic sounds. Second, we found that movement, similar to listening, is tied to the individual and thereby leads to features and constraints for composition. Third, we found that sound can change people's experiences of the physical presence of the robot. Our discussion highlights that designing robot sounds benefits from a dialectical interaction approach. This offers a new direction for sound in human-robot interaction, relying not just on linear and functional design, but rather on designing for sound experiences.

Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is an increasingly prominent topic in CSCW. From telepresence systems through field robots for extreme missions to social robots in homes, HRC is becoming a recurring theme across a broad range of CSCW research. Based on the growing interest, we explore the coupling of the field of CSCW and research on robotics at this critical time. This paper presents a primary and secondary literature review of CSCW proceedings and venues for robotics research. We identified 29 CSCW papers that contribute to the body of HRC research and analyse the foundations on which these papers rely. Then, we identified 138 papers published in robotics outlets that either (1) cite one or more CSCW papers, or (2) use the term CSCW. We discuss how CSCW is currently contributing to HRC research through five research topics: Sociomateriality, teamwork, awareness, embodiment, and communication. The paper contributes by offering three key future pathways for expanding this area of research, outlining questions and gaps that have yet to be explored for (1) expanding the application domains and diversifying robot types for HRC, (2) methodological implications for HRC, and (3) learning from human collaboration.

In efforts to disseminate research on human-robot interaction, many researchers use illustrations in the form of sketches, photographs, and 3D models of robot movements. These illustrations are not only useful for building on the research, but they also capture ways researchers think about robot movement. In this paper, we review papers from the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in which such illustrations are presented supplementary to the text. We analyse a total of 181 illustrations from 137 papers to understand the diverse ways in which robot movements are illustrated as well as how each style supports and limits information about the movements. We identify 10 basic styles that are used. Based on a visual analysis of these styles, we provide a detailed examination of each. This paper contributes with an overview that can be used to support future dissemination within the HRI research community. We present four aspects to consider for future illustrations and a discussion on how our findings could be utilised in early design processes.

Genomic research emerges from collaborative work within and across different scientific disciplines. A diverse range of visualisation techniques has been employed to aid this research, yet relatively little is known as to how these techniques facilitate collaboration. We conducted a case study of collaborative research within a biomedical institute to learn more about the role visualisation plays in genomic mapping. Interviews were conducted with molecular biologists (N = 5) and bioinformaticians (N = 6). We found that genomic research comprises a variety of distinct disciplines engaged in complex analytic tasks that each resist simplification, and their complexity influences how visualisations were used. Visualisation use was impacted by group-specific interactions and temporal work patterns. Visualisations were also crucial to the scientific workflow, used for both question formation and confirmation of hypotheses, and acted as an anchor for the communication of ideas and discussion. In the latter case, two approaches were taken: providing collaborators with either interactive or static imagery representing a viewpoint. The use of generic software for simplified visualisations, and quick production and curation was also noted. We discuss these findings with reference to group-specific interactions and present recommendations for improving collaborative practices through visual analytics.

Cycling offers significant health and environmental benefits, but safety remains a critical issue. We need better tools and design processes to develop on-bicycle notification interfaces, for example, for hazard warnings, and to overcome design challenges associated with the cycling context. We present a physical computing toolkit that supports the rapid exploration and co-design of on-bicycle interfaces. Physical plug-and-play interaction modules controlled by an orchestration interface allow participants to explore different tangible and ambient interaction approaches on a budget cycling simulator. The toolkit was assessed by analysing video recordings of two group design workshops (N=8) and twelve individual design sessions (N=12). Our results show that the toolkit enabled flexible transitions between ideation and out-of-the-box thinking, prototyping, and immediate evaluation. We offer insights on how to design physical computing toolkits that offer low-cost, 'good enough' simulation while allowing for free and safe exploration of on-bicycle notification interfaces.

In this article, we frame the process of visualisation design as a systematic transformation between two distinct domain-specific languages. As a result, we obtain a general framework, which may inform the process of visualisation design, as well as enable the creation of flexible general-purpose systems for interactive visual analytics. Our efforts aim towards raising the level of abstraction, by allowing users to express queries through a vocabulary that is specific to their problem domain. This domain-specific language is based on the conceptual model of the input data. Subsequently, a visualisation specification prescribes a language transformation, which maps from the user-defined conceptual model to the application-defined graphics grammar. The key to this approach is a formal interpretation of the conceptual data model, using rich type information in order to capture the data semantics and structure. The theoretical foundations for this approach are introduced, building on existing theories from database, type system, and visualisation literature. Subsequently, we discuss the key concepts of the proposed framework. Finally, the applications of the framework are illustrated by three use cases, which successfully applied these concepts in real-world visual analytics scenarios.

Over the last decade, the development of a range of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) technologies has led to an enormous increase in the size of the data sets available in molecular biology. The scale of these data presents new challenges for researchers, and visualisation is widely regarded as an essential tool for exploration and detailed analysis of candidate relationships. Inevitably, there are cognitive and technical limits on the information which may usefully be displayed on a particular device, and there may be some tension between the analytical utility of a representation and its coverage of the relationships available within the data. Careful attention must be given to the overall design of the visualisation, and to the channels selected, and these tasks are further complicated if the intent is to support interactive exploration by a number of collocated researchers or inclusion within a collaborative workflow. This paper is concerned with the design of a visualisation for regulatory interactions in bacteria, the complex relationships that exist between a set of proteins and the much larger set of genes whose action they control. Modelling these interactions yields equally complex network diagrams, and even classical hairball representations when visualised. In this work we explore the iterative refinement of an alternative visualisation for data of this kind, moving away from the traditional hairball to a 'field' of smaller structures, the intent being to support effective comparison across many dozens of strains and species rather than the exhaustive documentation of a full set of interactions for the one organism. While the study did not directly compare insights obtained using TRNDiff with those obtained using other tools, formal evaluations have allowed us to settle on an effective set of representations and visual channels, and interactive features to support analysis. Our approach has produced a far more effective visualisation of these important data sets, and offers useful lessons for tool developers and insights into the utility of touch devices and larger displays for visual analytics and generation of insight at scale.

This article presents our interaction design for DataChopin , based on an extensive survey and classification of visualisation for exploratory data analysis. Its distinctive characteristics are the use of a large-scale display wall as a shared desktop, as well as flexible composition mechanisms for incremental and piece-wise construction of visualisations. We chose composability as a guiding principle in our design, since it is essential to open-ended exploration, as well as collaborative analysis. For one, it enables truly exploratory inquiry by letting users freely examine different combinations of data, rather than offering a predetermined set of choices. Perhaps more importantly, it provides a foundation for data analysis through collaborative interaction with visualisations. If data and visualisations are composable, they can split into independent parts and recombined during the analytical process, allowing analysts to seamlessly transition between closely- and loosely-coupled work.

This study investigates how offshore information technology (IT) service providers (vendors) coordinate work with their clients (employers) in order to succeed in the global IT offshore outsourcing industry. We reviewed literature on coordination studies, interviewed offshore service providers in the Philippines, and used thematic analysis to analyse coordination practices from the point of view of these individual vendors in a newly industrialized country. We used Olson and Olson's framework on 'collaboration at a distance' as a lens to structure the results. The study provides an understanding of vendors' individual attitudes towards the coordination of distributed work and draws attention to how differences in power affect the work situation of vendors, and by implication all stakeholders. We offer this insight as a way to enhance existing CSCW frameworks, by imbuing them with the perspective of non-equal relationships. The study found that vendors were generally able to produce outputs that satisfy their clients, however these results were only achieved because individuals were willing to take risks and make sacrifices in their personal lives. The relationship was further characterised by a complex interplay between the client's control of the overall work arrangements and the vendors' ability to establish a level of autonomy in their work practices and their flexible use of coordination tools.

Abstract While many measures of viewpoint goodness have been proposed in computer graphics, none have been evaluated for ribbon representations of protein secondary structure. To fill this gap, we conducted a user study on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform, collecting human viewpoint preferences from 65 participants for 4 representative superfamilies of protein domains. In particular, we evaluated viewpoint entropy, which was previously shown to be a good predictor for human viewpoint preference of other, mostly non‐abstract objects. In a second study, we asked 7 experts in molecular biology to find the best viewpoint of the same protein domains and compared their choices with viewpoint entropy. Our results indicate that viewpoint entropy overall is a significant predictor of human viewpoint preference for ribbon representations of protein secondary structure. However, the accuracy depends on the type and composition of the structure: while most participants agree on good viewpoints for structures with mainly beta sheets, viewpoint preference varies considerably for complex arrangements of alpha helices. Finally, experts tend to choose viewpoints of both low and high viewpoint entropy to emphasize different aspects of the respective structure.

This research proposes the development of interfaces to support collaborative, community-driven inquiry into data, which we refer to as Participatory Data Analytics. Since the investigation is led by local communities, it is not possible to anticipate which data will be relevant and what questions are going to be asked. Therefore, users have to be able to construct and tailor visualisations to their own needs. The poster presents early work towards defining a suitable compositional model, which will allow users to mix, match, and manipulate data sets to obtain visual representations with little-to-no programming knowledge. Following a user-centred design process, we are subsequently planning to identify appropriate interaction techniques and metaphors for generating such visual specifications on wall-sized, multi-touch displays.

This paper explores the nature of interfaces to support people in accessing their files at tabletop displays embedded in the environment. To do this, we designed a study comparing people's interaction with two very different classes of file system access interface: Focus, explicitly designed for tabletops, and the familiar hierarchical Windows Explorer. In our within-subjects double-crossover study, participants collaborated on 4 planning tasks. Based on video, logs, questionnaires and interviews, we conclude that both classes of interface have a place. Notably, Focus contributed to improved collaboration and more efficient use of the workspace than with Explorer. Our results inform a set of recommendations for future interfaces enabling this important class of interaction -- supporting access to files for collaboration at tabletop devices embedded in an ubicomp environment.

This paper presents the results of a comparative study of 4-person collaborative teams working at a traditional table with pen and paper vs. a multi-touch table with digital keyboards and notepads. We compare the social behaviours of ‘giving’ and ‘taking’ during intensely collaborative teamwork, namely the differences between paper-based behaviour, digital-object based behaviour and a mixed condition behaviour where both paper and digital objects were used. Differences in sharing behaviour may be attributed to the degree of ownership afforded by digital objects on a touch display vs. paper objects. Additional visual metaphors to help tabletop users are recommended.

We introduce and explore the notion of intentionally enriched awareness. Intentional enrichment refers to the process of actively engaging users in the awareness process by enabling them to express intentions. We explore this concept designing and evalua

This article enhances existing approaches to present-day asynchronous awareness concepts by providing the means to explicitly represent and mediate contextual information. The resulting concept of contextual awareness takes different notions of the term context into account. Following a human-centered approach, the proposed methods serve as mediators for context between persons rather than automatically detecting context. Based on this variant of awareness, the atmosphere framework is introduced to provide mechanisms to deal with the problem of workload in tandem with contextual information. Atmosphere provides a highly tailorable structure and interface to deal with a wide variance of user and organizational requirements. The article closes with the description of a partial implementation of the framework and its evaluation.