Mountain areas are especially vulnerable to climate change. In recent years, intermittent droughts have forced many Alpine huts to close early or rely on cable cars or helicopters to import water. To raise awareness of water scarcity among hut visitors, we developed Framing Water, a reflective game based on the data physicalization of each visitor's water consumption during an overnight stay. The game requires players to select their most essential water-using activities without exceeding a fixed limit. Yet it is designed not to provide a univocal answer about the right choices to make but to spark reflection and dialogue around trade-offs in daily practices. We evaluated it with 56 participants and found that water-use decisions are influenced by individual needs, values, and social norms. This work contributes to Sustainable HCI by showing how playful, data-driven artifacts can foster reflection and negotiation of resource use in response to climate challenges.

Designing socio-technical systems for rural areas requires empowering local actors to actively engage in a creative process that thoroughly considers the unique characteristics of these territories. Methods intended for urban contexts often fail to account for rural communities’ specific values, cultures, and needs. Furthermore, the focus is usually on the design of the digital part of the innovation, its requirements, and technological constraints, leaving out other essential enablers. To address this, we present a toolkit designed to boost reflection on the key ‘'ingredients'’ — social, economic, technological, political, and infrastructural — essential for addressing rural challenges through socio-technical interventions. The toolkit offers tangible, user-friendly resources that encourage dialogue, self-reflection, and the creative envisioning of rural transformations. It includes inspirational cardsas well asreflectionquestionsto support communities in evaluating their needs, resources, and aspirations, fosteringself-awareness, learning, andaction.

Mountain huts are buildings in remote mountain areas that depend on local water sources, such as snow, rain, and springs, as they are not connected to centralized water systems. In this pictorial, we report the design process undertaken to explore how data physicalization can communicate the problem of water scarcity in mountain huts with the ultimate goal of encouraging visitors to reduce water usage. The process led to two concepts: one that materializes the impact of each visitor on the water reserve of the hut through a participatory installation, and the other that invites visitors to explore the concept of limit, encouraging reflection on what they are willing to renounce and helping them to make informed choices within tight water constraints. With our work, we aim to contribute to the ongoing efforts in Sustainable HCI to shift the purpose of behavior change from personal gain to the common good.

Learning outdoor sports entails acquiring physical skills, managing gear, and coordinating with others. We investigated how speleologists are trained to explore underground caves. We interviewed 15 instructors and 10 trainees to understand the main problems that may occur during training cave trips. Our findings show that stressful situations are linked to beginners’ difficulties applying new gestures and procedures - on which their progression and safety depend - and coordinating with others when they are out of sight. It emerged that group awareness and communication are pivotal for their tranquility. Yet, the underground environment makes communicating very hard. This study led to the elaboration of design implications for technology supporting awareness, communication, and coordination in speleology training, which draw from and enrich previous literature on coordination in the wild, as it may happen while performing outdoor sports or during search-and-rescue operations.

The COVID-19 emergency has posed many challenges to the worldwide school system leading to school closures and massive adoption of distance education. These events affected not only the way education is delivered but also the overall school community’s wellbeing and cohesion. In this paper, we present a playful education platform originally designed to promote sustainable mobility in schools that has been adapted to support distance learning and community engagement during the health emergency. In the original version of the platform, the home-school distances traveled by students with sustainable means contributed to the advancement of the whole class in a collective virtual trip associated with playful learning material. Conversely, in a revised version of the platform adapted to the new context, students could advance in the virtual trip by reporting the good deeds performed at home. Findings from 161 questionnaires completed by teachers, families, and students, as well as results from online workshops with students, and the analysis of log files at the end of the school year revealed the opportunities and limitations of converting a playful activity conceived for being experienced in class into an online activity to be completed at home. The results show that the adapted version contributed to the school community cohesion and provided a positive experience to all its members, even though it was not able to completely overcome the generalized feeling of isolation. This paper contributes to understanding the social value of collaborative and playful digital activities that involve the entire school community, showing how technology can impact education and support communities in times of crisis.

Due to recent technological advancements, governments can exercise an unprecedented amount of power over their citizens. It is vital to understand how governments impose restrictions on citizens through digital technologies, especially if those restrictions can save lives. Here, we look at the case of Home Quarantine—a Polish government-mandated smartphone application whose use has become mandatory during the COVID-19 crisis. Users in quarantine are legally required to use the application, reporting location and take selfie photographs. We conducted an autoethnographic diary study of one author using the app during quarantine and interviews with 23 users. We found that the app assisted in creating quarantine life routines and affected social interactions. Users connected with the world outside quarantine through selfies. We also uncovered key reservations our users had about using this app. Our work broadens the understanding of location-based apps and practices around surveillance technologies.

This paper presents a literature review of human- computer interaction works on wearable systems for sports. We selected a corpus of 57 papers and analyzed them through the grounded theory for literature review approach. We identified five themes across the papers: the different research perspectives, the type of sports and sportspeople, the roles of wearables in sports, their wearability, and the different types of feedback. These themes helped us in delineating opportunities for future research: the investigation of different form factors and types of feedback; the consideration of different sportspeople and collaborative tasks; the need of pushing the boundaries of the sports domain; the exploration of the evolution of sports; the interconnection of different devices; and the increase of methodological rigor.

While outdoor sport activities keep gaining popularity as part of a global trend to maintain a healthier lifestyle, current technology offers limited support for activity-specific needs. Therefore, a greater understanding of information sharing behaviours is necessary in order to build comprehensive, socially-embedded sports applications. To this purpose, we interviewed 46 practitioners in three outdoor sports: trail running, climbing, and skiing. Our qualitative study investigates how participants share information in the context of outdoor sports and how current technology supports this practice. Through thematic analysis, we derived five themes that describe the current information sharing practices: nature, risk and planning, content selection, audience selection, and privacy. Based on these themes, we present five recommendations for design that can inform, inspire and refine future sharing technologies for outdoor sport.

Drawing on concepts from theories on persuasion, social psychology, and philosophy of language, this article presents the design of an ambient persuasive system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting a balanced flow of communication in group conversational activity. The system includes two main components: (a) a context-awareness system that monitors group member non-verbal behavior, and (b) a visualization component that promotes balanced participation, providing targeted directives to participants through peripheral displays. In two empirical studies, a strategy for influencing participant social dynamics based on subtle directives in the form of aesthetically pleasant visual animations was assessed. The findings provide insight on the effect, the acceptability, and the perceived influence of subtle peripheral persuasive messages for ambient displays. The studies indicate that when the participants understand the message intention, the subtle directives have a positive influence on group behavior, and are considered more appealing and less intrusive than overt, language-based messages. Furthermore, it was found that personality traits influenced attitudes towards the system.

In this paper, we present a system that acts as an automatic facilitator by supporting the flow of communication in a group conversation activity. The system monitors the group members' non-verbal behavior and promotes balanced participation, giving targeted directives to the participants through peripheral displays. We describe an initial study to compare two ways of influencing participantsfi social dynamics: overt directives, explicit recommendations of social actions displayed in the form of text; or subtle directives, where the same recommendations are provided in an implicit manner. Our study indicates that, when the participants understand how the implicit messages work, the subtle facilitation is regarded as more useful than the overt one and it is considered to more positively influence the group behavior.