While there is a strong relationship between climate change and human food consumption, it is challenging to understand the implications and impact from an individual perspective. The lack of a shared frame of reference, that allows people to compare their impact to others, limits awareness on this complex topic. To support group reflections and social comparison of the impact of people's food consumption on climate change, we designed Econundrum, a shared physical data sculpture that visualizes carbon emissions resulting from dietary choices of a small community. Our three-week field study demonstrates how Econundrum helped people (i) understand the climate impact of various food types, (ii) reflect on the environmental impact of their food choices; and (iii) discuss the relation between climate impact and food consumption with others. Our study shows how a shared physical data sculpture mediates a complex topic to a community by facilitating the social dynamics in context.

Recently, the HCI community has seen increased interest in the design of teaching augmentation (TA): tools that extend and complement teachers' pedagogical abilities during ongoing classroom activities. Examples of TA systems are emerging across multiple disciplines, taking various forms: e.g., ambient displays, wearables, or learning analytics dashboards. However, these diverse examples have not been analyzed together to derive more fundamental insights into the design of teaching augmentation. Addressing this opportunity, we broadly synthesize existing cases to propose the TA framework. Our framework specifies a rich design space in five dimensions, to support the design and analysis of teaching augmentation. We contextualize the framework using existing designs cases, to surface underlying design trade-offs: for example, balancing actionability of presented information with teachers' needs for professional autonomy, or balancing unobtrusiveness with informativeness in the design of TA systems. Applying the TA framework, we identify opportunities for future research and design.

The representation of sounds derived from everyday life can be beneficial for people with dementia by evoking memories and emotional responses. Despite this potential, integrating sound and sound-based interventions in care facilities has not received much research attention. In this paper, we present the findings from a field study that explored the responses of 19 people with advanced dementia to a selection of everyday sounds presented to them in a care home and the role of these responses in the care environment. To study this, we deployed Vita, a 'pillow-like' sound player, in two dementia care facilities for four weeks, during which observations were recorded. Afterwards, we conducted interviews with caregivers who used Vita in everyday care practice. Our findings reveal how everyday sounds provided by Vita stimulated meaningful conversation, playfulness, and connection between residents and caregivers. Furthermore, we propose design implications for integrating everyday sounds in dementia care.

This pictorial proposes an alternative mode of interaction between nurses and clinical alarm syste ms and shows how three concepts, developed to interact through the end user's periphery of attention, can be applied in a clinical setting to improve the workflow of nurses and wellbeing of patients.

There has been an increased interest in researching the beneficial effects of everyday sounds, other than music on people with dementia. However, to turn this potential into concrete design applications, a qualitative understanding of how people engage with sound is needed. This paper presents the outcomes of three workshops, exploring the personal experiences evoked by soundscapes of people in early to mid-stages of dementia. Using the dementia soundboard, we provide key insights into how sounds from everyday life triggered personal associations, memories of the past, emotional responses, and the sharing of experiences. Furthermore, we identified several design considerations and practical insights for sound-based technologies in the context of dementia care. This paper sets out a path for further design-research explorations and development of concrete sound-based interventions, for enriching the everyday lives of people with dementia.

Through the integration of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in the classrooms, there is an increase in Virtual Learning Environment-supported classes in secondary schools, which brings unintentional complexities in terms of monitoring for teachers [25]. To support secondary school teachers during VLE-supported lessons, a peripheral data visualisation system was designed and implemented in a three-week field study. Both qualitative and quantitative data were gathered and analysed through methodological triangulation in order to get an in-depth understanding about the use of the system by teachers. The key findings from our study were that the peripheral data visualisation tool, by being a distributed, highly visible system, was well integrated in the teachers' practice. The peripheral visualisation served as a trigger for teacher interventions where the teacher could confront the student's level of concentration and provide support when a student needs it. Furthermore, by offloading the secondary tasks of checking the students' level of concentration and progress to the visualisation, most teachers experienced more peace of mind and space to manage their primary teaching practice. Lastly, approximately 95% of 89 students experienced the data visualisation as neutral or motivating, while 5.7% of the students experienced violation of privacy by this medium.

Reflecting on their performance during classroom-teaching is an important competence for teachers. Such reflection-in-action (RiA) enables them to optimize teaching on the spot. But RiA is also challenging, demanding extra thinking in teachers' already intensive routines. Little is known on how HCI systems can facilitate teachers' RiA during classroom-teaching. To fill in this gap, we evaluate ClassBeacons, a system that uses spatially distributed lamps to depict teachers' ongoing performance on how they have divided their time and attention over students in the classroom. Empirical qualitative data from eleven teachers in 22 class periods show that this ambient information facilitated teachers' RiA without burdening teaching in progress. Based on our theoretical grounding and field evaluation, we contribute empirical knowledge about how an HCI system enhanced teachers' process of RiA as well as a set of design principles for unobtrusively supporting RiA.

This paper explores how a design fiction can be designed to be used as a pragmatic user-centred design method to generate insights on future technology use. We built HawkEye, a design fiction probe that embodies a future fiction of dementia care. To learn how participants respond to the probe, we employed it with eight participants for three weeks in their own homes as well as evaluating it with six HCI experts in sessions of 1.5h. In addition to presenting the probe in detail, we share insights into the process of building it and discuss the utility of design fiction as a tool to elicit empathetic and rich discussions about potential outcomes of future technologies.

Personal photo collections have grown due to digital photography and the introduction of smartphones, and photo collections have become harder to manage. Deleting photos appears to be difficult and the task of curation is often perceived as not enjoyable. The lack of curation can make it harder to retrieve photos when people need them for various reasons, such as individual reminiscing, shared remembering or self-presentation. In this study we investigate how we can stimulate people to organise their photo collections on their smartphones. Ten participants evaluated and qualitatively compared four applications with different characteristics regarding voting on and deleting photos. We found that voting on photos is easier and more enjoyable in comparison to deleting photos, that participants showed reminiscence while organising, that deleting can be frustrating, that participants have different preferences for sorting and viewing photos and that voting could make deleting and retrieving easier.

Amongst the variety of (multi-modal) interaction techniques that are being developed and explored, the Motion Matching paradigm provides a novel approach to selection and control. In motion matching, users interact by rhythmically moving their bodies to track the continuous movements of different interface targets. This paper builds upon the current algorithmic and usability focused body of work by exploring the product possibilities and implications of motion matching. Through the development and qualitative study of four novel and different real-world motion matching applications --- with 20 participants --- we elaborate on the suitability of motion matching in different multi-user scenarios, the less pertinent use in home environments and the necessity for multi-modal interaction. Based on these learnings, we developed three novel motion matching based interactive lamps, which report on clear paths for further dissemination of the embodied interaction technique's experience. This paper hereby informs the design of future motion matching interfaces and products.

As necessary for creating a learner-centered environment, nowadays teachers are expected to be more mindful about their proximity distribution: how to spend time in different locations of the classroom with individual learners. However feedback on this is only given to teachers by experts after classroom observation. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of ClassBeacons, a novel ambient information system that visualizes teachers' physical proximity through tangible devices distributed over the classroom. An expert review and a field evaluation with eight secondary school teachers were conducted to explore potential values of such a system and gather user experiences. Results revealed rich insights into how the system could influence teaching and learning, as well as how a distributed display can be seamlessly integrated into teachers' routines.

There is an increasing interest in the HCI research community to design richer user interactions with the Internet of Things (IoT). This studio will allow exploring the design of tangible interaction with the IoT, what we call Internet of Tangibles. In particular, we aim at investigating the full interaction-attention continuum, with the purpose of designing IoT tangible interfaces that can switch between peripheral interactions that do not disrupt everyday routines, and focused interactions that support user's reflections. This investigation will be conducted through hands-on activities where participants will prototype tangible IoT objects, starting by a paper prototyping phase, supported by design cards, and followed by an Arduino prototype phase. The purpose of the studio is also establishing a community of researchers and practitioners, from both academy and industry, interested in the field of tangible interaction with the Internet of Things.

Connected lighting solutions are replacing traditional lightbulbs in the home environment and offer unlimited numbers of light settings, varying in color, brightness, saturation and more. Interaction design for such systems is challenging: simple switches no longer suffice, and asking users to specify all parameters of all lightbulbs separately is time-consuming and requires them to understand the desired outcome. This paper presents Plux, a tangible light controller which employs a hybrid control approach. Plux generates light settings of pseudo-randomized color palettes, while users control the saturation and brightness directly. Plux is intended to enable serendipitous exploration of new light settings using a peripheral interaction design approach. A field deployment in which 5 people used Plux for 3 weeks in their homes revealed that using Plux easily became a part of the everyday routine. Plux's hybrid control approach was particularly valuable for users who struggle to determine the desired light setting.

Continuous developments in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) are resulting in an omnipresence of digital technologies in our everyday lives, which is also visible in the presence of supportive technologies in education. These technologies, e.g. tablets and computers, usually require focused attention to be operated, which hinders teachers from appropriating them while teaching. Peripheral interactive systems, which do not require focused attention, could play a role in relieving teachers' cognitive load, such that mental resources are freed to focus on other teaching tasks. This paper presents an exploratory study on enabling such cognitive offloading through peripheral interaction in the classroom. We present the design and a seven-week field deployment of FireFlies2 interactive tangible pixels which are distributed over the classroom. Our findings show that FireFlies2 supported cognitive processes of teachers and pupils in a number of scenarios.

This paper presents a prototype of a smart home control system operated through motion matching input. In motion matching, targets move continuously in a singular and pre-defined path; users interact with these targets by tracking their movement for a short period of time. Our prototype captures user input through the motion sensors embedded in off-the-shelf smartwatches while users track the moving targets with their arms and hands. The wearable nature of the tracking system makes our prototype ideal for interaction with numerous devices in a smart home.

Reminders are designed to support remembering actions or intentions to be performed later in time. Most technologies that have a reminding functionality do so by asking attention (e.g., by using auditory alerts or vibration patterns) from users at a certain point in time or location. Because of their obtrusive nature, the reminders of many (digital) prospective memory aids we use on a daily basis are hard to ignore, regardless of our ability and motivation to perform the reminded action or intention. In this paper, we present Wobble: an interactive cone-shaped artefact for reminding in the home environment. Wobble was designed to investigate peripheral reminders. Our results imply that wobble is best suitable for reminding intentions that do not require direct action but can be carried out over a period of time, which is a type of reminding currently not met by most electronic memory aids.

Although seemingly simple and easy to design for, the moment of waking up and deciding on how long to snooze poses interesting design challenges. While traditional alarm clock interfaces feature large buttons or dropdown menus to communicate (fixed) snooze time, embodied interaction with the entire alarm clock can help to express how much snooze time is desired in a more nuanced way. This paper presents the design of Tumble Clock, a buttonless "balance-object" that exposes its entire surface as interaction area, allowing for snoozing its alarm simply by tilting and releasing or pushing the entire artefact. The Tumble Clock's interaction possibilities and the appreciation of this tangible approach to interaction with time have been evaluated in a user study. Our study indicates that, when enriched with feedback on action, the Tumble Clock's balance behavior can successfully facilitate in tangibly communicating variable intangible information such as snooze time.

Internet of things (IoT) devices and sensor kits have the potential to democratize the access, use, and appropriation of data. Despite the increased availability of low cost sensors, most of the produced data is "black box" in nature: users often do not know how to access or interpret data. We propose a "human-data design" approach in which end-users are given tools to create, share, and use data through tangible and physical visualizations. This paper introduces Physikit, a system designed to allow users to explore and engage with environmental data through physical ambient visualizations. We report on the design and implementation of Physikit, and present a two-week field study which showed that participants got an increased sense of the meaning of data, embellished and appropriated the basic visualizations to make them blend into their homes, and used the visualizations as a probe for community engagement and social behavior.

Most interactions with today’s interfaces require a person’s full and focused attention. To alleviate the potential clutter of focal information, we investigated how interactions could be designed to take place in the background or periphery of attention. This paper explores whether gestural, multimodal interaction styles of an interactive light system allow for this. A study compared the performance of interactions with the light system in two conditions: the central condition in which participants interacted only with the light system, and the peripheral condition in which they interacted with the system while performing a high-attentional task simultaneously. Our study furthermore compared different feedback styles (visual, auditory, haptic, and a combination). Results indicated that especially for the combination feedback style, the interaction could take place without participants’ full visual attention, and performance did not significantly decrease in the peripheral condition. This seems to indicate that these interactions at least partly took place in their periphery of attention and that the multimodal feedback style aided this process.

In task performance, pragmatic actions refer to behaviors that make direct progress, while epistemic actions involve altering the world so that cognitive processes are faster, more reliable or less taxing. Epistemic actions are frequently presented as a beneficial consequence of interacting with tangible systems. However, we currently lack tools to measure epistemic behaviors, making substantiating such claims highly challenging. This paper addresses this problem by presenting ATB, a video-coding framework that enables the identification and measurement of different epistemic actions during problem-solving tasks. The framework was developed through a systematic literature review of 78 papers, and analyzed through a study involving a jigsaw puzzle -- a classical spatial problem -- involving 60 participants. In order to assess the framework's value as a metric, we analyze the study with respect to its reliability, validity and predictive power. The broadly supportive results lead us to conclude that the ATB framework enables the use of observed epistemic behaviors as a performance metric for tangible systems. We believe that the development of metrics focused explicitly on the properties of tangible interaction are currently required to gain insight into the genuine and unique benefits of tangible interaction. The ATB framework is a step towards this goal.

Many actions in the physical world take place in the background or periphery of people’s attention. However, interactions with computing technologies usually require focused attention. This article explores the concept of peripheral interaction: physical interaction with technology that takes place outside the focus of attention. A peripheral interaction design (called FireFlies), which supports primary school teachers in their everyday routine through open-ended light-objects on the children’s desks, was deployed in 4 classrooms for 6 weeks. Results of interviews and video analysis indicate that the 6 participating teachers were able to physically interact with the FireFlies interactive artifact quickly and frequently without disturbing ongoing tasks. In the final weeks of the study, the teachers seemed able to easily shift their focus of attention between their main task and the interactive system. We therefore conclude that, even though it is difficult to measure people’s attention, a longitudinal approach seemed effective to find indicators for peripheral interaction.

This paper presents a research-through-design study into interactive systems for a primary school setting to support teachers' everyday tasks. We developed an open-ended interactive system called FireFlies, which is intended to be interacted with in the periphery of the teacher's attention and thereby become an integral part of everyday routines. FireFlies uses light-objects and audio as a (background) information display. Furthermore, teachers can manipulate the light and audio through physical interaction. A working prototype of FireFlies was deployed in four different classrooms for six weeks. Qualitative results reveal that all teachers found a relevant way of working with FireFlies, which they applied every day of the evaluation. After the study had ended and the systems were removed from the schools, the teachers kept reaching for the devices and mentioned they missed FireFlies, which shows that it had become part of their everyday routine.

In this paper we present SpectroFlexia, a form of interactive stained glass that is designed to present information in the periphery of people's attention. SpectroFlexia is developed in an iterative design process which revealed a low-cost method of smoothly changing the color of light shining through translucent materials. Using this method, SpectroFlexia can display several types of digital information through the speed at which its colors change. In addition to providing peripheral information, SpectroFlexia is designed to serve a decorative function. An informal user exploration with an interactive prototype of SpectroFlexia indicated that smooth color transitions are a promising way of presenting peripheral information.

This paper explores the concept of peripheral interactions; interactions with technology that take place in the background or periphery of the attention. We present two designs for a classroom setting. CawClock makes selected time frames audible in order to provide teachers with awareness of time. NoteLet is designed to support the teacher in observing children's behavior, by enabling him or her to take pictures of the classroom through straightforward interactions on a bracelet. A qualitative, two-week exploration of both systems in a classroom revealed that the soundscapes of CawClock indeed shifted to the periphery of the attention and supported the teacher's time awareness. The actions with NoteLet did not shift to the periphery. However, the tangible aspects of NoteLet seemed to facilitate the interaction to be quick and simple, which may indicate that it could shift to the periphery with more practice. Tangible interaction therefore seems a promising interaction style for this purpose.

Interactions in and with the physical world have enabled us to perform everyday activities in the periphery of our attention. Even though digital technologies are becoming increasingly present in the everyday environment, interaction with these technologies usually requires people’s focused attention. In the realm of the vision of calm technology, we think that designing interactions with the digital world inspired by our peripheral interaction with the physical world, will enable digital technologies to better blend into our everyday lives. However, for such interaction design to be effective, a detailed understanding of the everyday periphery is required. In this paper, we therefore present a qualitative study on everyday activities that may take place in the periphery of the attention. We provide a broad range of examples of such everyday activities and cluster them to present the conditions under which they may be performed peripherally. Furthermore, we discuss how our findings may be relevant for the design of peripheral interactions with digital technologies, and present two conceptual designs that are based on our findings.

For centuries, learning and development has been supported by physical activity and manipulating physical objects. With the introduction of embedded technologies, opportunities for employing tangible or embodied interaction for learning and development have emerged. As a result of previous research, we have seen that interaction models based on embodied knowledge (through embodied metaphors) can support children’s learning in abstract domains. Although metaphorical mappings are promoted in tangible and embodied interaction research, little is known about how to identify embodied metaphors, or how to implement them effectively into interaction models. In this paper, we introduce a people-centered, iterative approach to the design of tangible learning systems with embodied metaphor-based mappings. As a design case, we implemented our approach to the design of Moving Sounds (MoSo) Tangibles; a tangible system for learning abstract sound concepts. The system consists of a set of interactive tangibles with which children can manipulate pitch, volume, and tempo of ongoing tones. In a user study with 39 participants, we found that all children were able to reproduce sound samples with MoSo Tangibles.

This paper describes ongoing research in a 4 year PhD project that started in June 2009. With the computer becoming pervasive in everyday life, a need for new interaction styles has emerged. In the realm of the vision of calm technology [6], we see potential in interaction shifting to the periphery of the attention. The aim of this research is to study interactive systems designed for peripheral interaction by combining physical artifacts and audio.

Using tangible interaction in interactive educational systems can benefit learning. This can be supported by relying on experientially originating schemata in the interaction design of learning systems. This paper presents the design and evaluation of MoSo Tangibles, a set of interactive, physical artifacts with which children manipulate the pitch, volume and tempo of ongoing tones, in order to structure their understanding of these abstract sound concepts in terms of multiple different concrete body-based concepts. The results indicate that MoSo provided children with a physical handle to reason about the targeted abstract concepts.

Physical activity and manipulating physical objects can be beneficial for learning. Earlier studies 2 have shown that interaction models that rely on unconscious and embodied knowledge (based on embodied metaphors) can benefit the learning process. However, more than one embodied metaphor might be applicable. In this paper, we present the results of a user study (n=65) designed to identify embodied metaphors seven to nine year old children use when enacting abstract concepts related to musical sound. The results provide evidence that multiple different embodied metaphors can unconsciously be used to structure the understanding of these concepts. In addition, we have identified and categorized commonly used metaphors based on the children's enactments of changing sound concepts.

Supporting users' reasoned imagination in sense making during interaction with tangible and embedded computation involves supporting the application of their existing mental schemata in understanding new forms of interaction. Recent studies that include an embodied metaphor in the interaction model, which relates action-based inputs to digital outputs, have provided evidence that this approach is beneficial. Yet the design of such systems has been difficult and full of setbacks. Wide spread adoption of this approach requires a better understanding of how to design such embodied metaphor-based interactional models. We analyze three recent design-based research studies in which we have been involved in order to derive design knowledge that may inform others. Following a case study methodology we identify kernels or points in the design process where discontinuities between predicted and actual interaction highlight important design knowledge.

In this paper we describe the game 'Weathergods', which is implemented on the Entertaible tabletop gaming platform [1]. The game uses either iconic or symbolic [2] tangible objects for interaction and marries both the advantages of traditional board games and computer games.