AI technologies that sense student attention and emotions to enable more personalised teaching interventions are increasingly promoted, but raise pressing questions about student learning, wellbeing, and ethics. In particular, students’ perspectives about AI sensing-intervention in learning are often overlooked. We conducted an online mixed-method experiment with Australian university students (N=132), presenting video scenarios varying by whether sensing was used (in-use vs. not-in-use), sensing modality (gaze-based attention detection vs. facial-based emotion detection), and intervention (by digital device vs. teacher). Participants also completed pairwise ranking tasks to prioritise six core ethical concerns. Findings revealed that students valued targeted intervention but responded negatively to AI monitoring, regardless of sensing methods. Students preferred system-generated hints over teacher-initiated assistance, citing learning agency and social embarrassment concerns. Students’ ethical considerations prioritised autonomy and privacy, followed by transparency, accuracy, fairness, and learning beneficence. We advocate designing customisable, social-sensitive, non-intrusive systems that preserve student control, agency, and well-being.

The opaqueness of moderation systems can leave offenders of toxic behaviour disaffected and without recourse for change. We examined whether explainability, the means by which an automated system explains its decisions, can improve player responses to automated moderation decisions within the context of multiplayer games. Through a mixed methods experiment we evaluated players’ perceptions of six explanations of an automated temporary ban decision. Despite finding only minor benefits to explainable AI methods over the best current explanation used in practice, we found that justification, i.e. providing evidence within an explanation, is fundamental for improving players’ perceived fairness and emotional response to moderation. We contextualise these results through a reflexive thematic analysis in which we identify four themes that reflect players’ competing understandings of both explainability and moderation. We conclude by proposing four design implications for researchers and developers to consider when designing explainability for future community management systems.

Although people often visit places of nature to disconnect from technology, increasingly digital tools are shaping these experiences. To better understand how technologies might become obtrusive in nature settings, and how people manage such obtrusiveness, we conducted a field study of 30 adults visiting an urban nature park and using digital tools that ranged in interactive intensity from simple photography, through photo sharing and plant identification, to a more immersive site-specific augmented reality app. Distinctive facets of the way they experienced technology as obtrusive were observed: deprivation, prescriptiveness, engrossment, diminishment, neediness, unreliability, and awkwardness. We identify six tactics used to manage these experiences: abstaining, limiting, minimising, deferring, delegating, and conforming. Our findings indicate that technological obtrusiveness is a complex experience affected not only by the intensity of interactive demands, but also incongruities between the way people desire to experience nature and technology-prescribed activities, and people’s agency to deploy mitigating tactics.

People often spend time in nature to escape an over-technologised life, yet they increasingly rely on technology to do so. Understanding how technology use shapes nature experiences is crucial, given their implications for wellbeing and environmental concern. Through in-depth interviews with 30 people, we examine this technology–nature paradox, focusing on commonplace digital tools used around visits to nature. Our findings chart how people assemble and manage a carefully chosen array of tools for each outing. We show how these technology choices depend on people’s adopted mode(s) of nature engagement, identifying six modes and their associated technologies: adventure, aesthetic, ambient, enquiry, escape, and novelty. We further demonstrate how these modes shape the temporal deployment of tools across phases of a visit: before, during, and after. We offer an interpretation of how people seek to manage the technology–nature paradox and consider broader implications for designing technologies for beneficial nature experiences.

Playing partial information, restricted communication, cooperative (PIRCC) games with humans have proven challenging for AI, due to our reliance on social dynamics and sophisticated cognitive techniques. Yet, recent advances in generative AI may change this situation through new forms of human-AI collaboration. This paper investigates how teams of players interact with an AI assistant in the PIRCC game Codenames and the impact this has on cognition, social dynamics, and player experience. We observed gameplay and conducted post-game focus groups with 54 participants across ten groups. Each group played three rounds of Codenames, with an AI assistant supporting Cluegivers. We found the AI assistant enhanced players' convergent and divergent thinking, but interfered with formation of team mental models, highlighting a tension in the use of AI in creative team scenarios. The presence of the AI challenged many players' understanding of the 'spirit of the game'. Furthermore, the presence of the AI assistants weakened social connections between human teammates, but strengthened connections across teams. This paper provides an empirical account of an AI assistant's effect on cognition, social dynamics, and player experience in Codenames. We highlight the opportunities and challenges that arise when designing hybrid digital boardgames that include AI assistants.

Games that feature multiple players, limited communication, and partial information are particularly challenging for AI agents. In the cooperative card game Hanabi, which possesses all of these attributes, AI agents fail to achieve scores comparable to even first-time human players. Through an observational study of three mixed-skill Hanabi play groups, we identify the techniques used by humans that help to explain their superior performance compared to AI. These concern physical artefact manipulation, coordination play, role establishment, and continual rule negotiation. Our findings extend previous accounts of human performance in Hanabi, which are purely in terms of theory-of-mind reasoning, by revealing more precisely how this form of collective decision-making is enacted in skilled human play. Our interpretation points to a gap in the current capabilities of AI agents to perform cooperative tasks.

Technological progress has often been measured by the extent to which it shields and protects us from the harshness of nature. At the same time, it has long been recognised that our resulting disengagement from nature negatively affects our wellbeing and impedes awareness of our vital dependence on natural environments. To understand how HCI has considered the possibilities that digital technology offers for engaging with nature, we conducted a scoping review encompassing more than 20 years of HCI research on nature engagement. We compare the orientations, motivations, and methodologies of different threads within this growing body of work. We show how HCI research has enabled varied forms of direct and indirect engagement with nature, and we develop a typology of the roles proposed for technology in this work. We highlight promising and under-utilised approaches to designing for nature engagement and discuss directions for future research.

Two decades of focus on User Experience has yielded an array of digital technologies that help people experience, understand and share emotions. Although the effects of specific technologies upon emotion have been well studied, less is known about how people actively appropriate and combine the full range of devices, apps and services at their disposal to deliberately manage emotions in everyday life. We conducted a one-week diary study in which 23 adults recorded interactions between their emotions and technology use. They reported using a diverse range of emotion-shaping tools and strategies as part of coping with daily challenges, managing routines, and pursuing work and social goals. We analyse these data in the light of psychological theories of emotion. Our findings point to the significance of digital emotion regulation as a powerful perspective to inform wider debates about the impacts of technology on social and emotional well-being.

In creating digital technologies for animals, designers often seek to deploy and adapt human-centred techniques of interaction design. A significant challenge lies in enabling animals to play an active and generative role in the design process. This is of particular concern when the primary design objective is to address the behavioural and psychological needs of animal users. In collaboration with orangutans and human stakeholders at a zoo, we conducted co-design to create an interactive installation to enhance the orangutans' wellbeing. This paper presents the design journey undertaken and reflects on the challenges of designing with animals in a complex real-world setting. From this, we propose ways in which interaction design methods can be better adapted to working with animals by integrating qualitative and quantitative techniques drawn from the animal sciences. These reflections and proposals are relevant to researchers and practitioners investigating the design of animal-centred digital technologies.

Voice control is an increasingly common feature of digital games, but the experience of playing with voice control is often hampered by feelings of embarrassment and dissonance. Past research has recognised these tensions, but has not offered a general model of how they arise and how players respond to them. In this study, we use Erving Goffman's frame analysis, as adapted to the study of games by Conway and Trevillian, to understand the social experience of playing games by voice. Based on 24 interviews with participants who played voice-controlled games in a social setting, we put forward a frame analytic model of gameplay as a social event, along with seven themes that describe how voice interaction enhances or disrupts the player experience. Our results demonstrate the utility of frame analysis for understanding social dissonance in voice interaction gameplay, and point to practical considerations for designers to improve engagement with voice-controlled games.

Libraries increasingly offer much of their collection online, rendering it invisible or unavailable to readers who, for reasons of information experience, prefer to browse the shelves. Although the evidence that shelf browsing is an important part of information behavior is increasing, information browsing as a behavior is somewhat of a black box (in contrast to web browsing, which is relatively well understood). It seems likely from early work that browsing is not, in fact, a monolithic behavior, but rather a set of behaviors and goals. The typologies presented in these works, however, are of a too high level to offer much insight into what support is needed for successful online browsing. In contrast, a recent spate of speculative browsing technologies meet some browsing needs, but offer little theoretical understanding of how systems support browsing. The major contribution of this article is a new typology of library browsing behavior based on recent observations of browsing behavior in libraries. The secondary contribution is an understanding of the interface features that would support these types of information browsers in an online environment.

This paper examines the complex relationship between competition and cooperation in boardgame play. We understand boardgaming as distributed cognition, where people work together in a shared activity to accomplish the game. Although players typically compete against each other, this competition is only possible through ongoing cooperation to negotiate, enact and maintain the rules of play. In this paper, we report on a study of people playing modern boardgames. We analyse how knowledge of the game's state is distributed amongst the players and the game components, and examine the different forms of cooperation and collaboration that occur during play. Further, we show how players use the material elements of the game to support articulation work and to improve their awareness and understanding of the game's state. Our goal is to examine the coordinative practices that the players use during play and explicate the ways in which these enable competition.

Strong user engagement with digital technologies for behaviour change is often taken as a precursor to their longer-term efficacy. We critically examine this assumption through a qualitative study of a smoking cessation app, called NewLeaf, which allows quitters to swap personal stories. The study examined what influenced people to engage or disengage with NewLeaf, and how the app was deployed in quit attempts during a four week trial. Several properties of swapped stories were reported to promote engagement, including: authenticity, currency, contextualization of advice, and evoking a sense of community. But while the resulting engagement was sometimes productive in supporting quitting, other trajectories of use were observed involving counterproductive engagement, and a surprising pattern of productive disengagement especially among stronger quitters. We discuss how this analysis of different trajectories problematizes any simple interpretation of user engagement as an early indicator of success for behaviour change technologies.

Animal conservation organisations occasionally harness depictions of animals using digital technology to inspire interest in, and concern for animals. To better understand the forms of empathy experienced by people observing animal-computer interaction, we designed and studied an interactive installation for orangutans at a zoo. Through collaborative design we established an understanding of zoos' objectives and strategies related to empathy in the zoo context. We deployed a prototype installation, and observed and interviewed visitors who watched orangutans use the installation. Analysis of observations and interviews revealed that visitors responded with cognitive, affective and motor empathy for the animals. We propose that these empathetic responses are prompted by the visibility of orangutans' bodily movements, by the "anthropic frame" provided by digital technology, and by prompting reflection on animals' cognitive processes and affective states. This paper contributes new evidence and understanding of people's empathetic responses to observing animal-computer interaction and confirms the value of designing for empathy in its various forms

Library shelf browsing is a much-loved but little-understood form of information seeking. Attempts have been made to replicate or replace it online, however they have not typically been based on a principled understanding of the goals and behaviours of readers. This paper addresses the behaviour of readers, presenting an empirical examination of the mechanics of library shelf browsing. We note some previously undescribed behaviours, such as placemarking, and some hitherto unknown details such as the large number of books browsers consider. We situate our findings in the literature, and use them to drive design recommendations.

This paper presents findings from a study of boardgamers which stress the importance of the materiality of modern boardgames. It demonstrates that materiality is one of four significant factors in the player experience of tabletop gaming and describes four domains of materiality in boardgaming settings. Further, building on understanding of non-use in HCI, it presents boardgames as a unique situation of parallel use, in which users simultaneously engage with a single game in both digital and material, non-digital environments.

Our paper investigates how current digital technologies are sufficient, or insufficient, in supporting Kenyan transnationals in practising indigenous knowledge. We first outline a view of indigenous knowledge, and then apply it to a study of diaspora Kenyans living in Australia. The findings are framed as nine techniques for sustaining displaced practising of indigenous knowledge. These appropriations suggest directions for technology innovation, providing design considerations for technologies that translate, formulate and support indigenous knowledge in transnational contexts.

Videogames are often played socially with both co-players and audiences. Audience members' experiences are not well understood, nor are the factors of videogaming sessions that influence their experience. We conducted a study to examine the effects of game physicality and turn anticipation on audience members' experiences in social videogaming sessions. Pairs of participants played games under three conditions of physicality (controller-based, Wii, and Kinect) and their expectation of turn-taking was manipulated. Their enjoyment, game engagement, social engagement and sense of participation were measured. We found that the introduction of turn-taking into the session had positive effects for audience members -- both anticipated and residual play effects -- and that Kinect gameplay resulted in a more enjoyable experience for audience members. We argue that audience members' experience changes as they become more active within a session, and suggest there are design opportunities between purely active 'players' and passive 'audience members'.

Social interaction can be a powerful strategy for persuasive technology interventions, yet many users are reluctant to engage with others online because they fear pressure, failure and shame. We introduce the 'ambivalent socialiser', a person who is simultaneously keen but also reluctant to engage with others via social media. Our contribution is to identify four approaches to introducing sociality to ambivalent socialisers: structured socialising, incidental socialising, eavesdropping and trace sensing. We discuss the rationale for these approaches and show how they address recent critiques of persuasive technology. Furthermore, we provide actionable insights for designers of persuasive technology by showing how these approaches can be implemented in a social media application.

Design-oriented frameworks are a type of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) discipline knowledge. They are intended to support iterative 'specify-and-implement' design practice, by assisting designers to create models of specific design problems, within a class of design problem. This paper presents a design-oriented framework for a class of HCI design problem, expressed as a the planning and control of multiple task work in secretarial office administration. The planning and control of multiple task work refers generally to how interactive human-computer worksystems specify and select behaviours for performing multiple concurrent tasks. Secretarial office administration is a sub-class of design problem, in which the work supports communications of the organization commissioning the new worksystem. The framework is based on a conception proposed to support an engineering discipline of HCI. The framework conceptualizes the relationship between an interactive worksystem, its domain of work and the effectiveness, or performance, with which work is carried out. The framework was developed from cognitive science and HCI theory and an empirical case-study of an existing secretarial worksystem. The framework expresses the domain of secretarial work as the state transformation of hierarchies of abstract and physical objects, representing communications carried out by the organization. The description of the secretarial worksystem expresses the relationship between abstract processes of planning, controlling, perceiving and executing, and abstract representations of plans and knowledge-of-tasks. Planning heuristics and control rules reflect general properties of the dynamic work domain, such as external interruptions and temporary opportunities. The framework also expresses the relationship between these planning and control structures and performance. In its current form, the framework is incomplete, but illustrates an approach to the development of design-oriented knowledge. Using this type of knowledge, a designer may reason about potential solutions to HCI design problems concerning planning and control behaviours for carrying out multiple task work for secretarial office administration.