Many children are disconnected from nature and have limited understanding of where their food comes from. Noticing nature, through active sensory engagement, is fundamental for children to learn to appreciate and care for it. Yet little is known about the noticing acts of children (3-5 years) in their everyday nature experiences in HCI research. We investigated children’s nature engagement in childcare centre settings, with a focus on food gardens and a view to understanding how digital technology might support it. Informed by literature on noticing, we conducted three design activities using prompt cards, an IoT-based camera and a Bee-Bot to analyse children’s noticing in food gardens, including: focal noticing of the more-than-human, relational noticing for connection, and temporal noticing through ecological tempos. We synthesise and highlight technology design opportunities that use slow noticing to bridge hidden to noticed, connect part to pattern, and attune from tempo to flow over time.

This paper presents Connected Prayerwheels, a pair of augmented cultural objects using gesture sensors, ambient lights, and a song sharing feature designed to enhance everyday cultural connectedness for Bhutanese families over distance. We conducted interviews and design discussions with participants across Bhutan and Australia to understand families’ everyday routines, practices, and interests. We found many of their everyday routines were rooted in Buddhist cultural and religious traditions, which they were keen to share over distance. We therefore designed a prototype, the Connected Prayerwheel, and demonstrated it to participants to explore whether it would be fitting to use a cultural device in a connected form. Our findings highlight how cultural connectedness can be enriched through connected cultural artifacts. Families enjoyed sharing prayers, Bhutanese songs and hymns (Choeyangs), and the meaning of cultural symbols. This study contributes the design and discussion of connected cultural artifacts to studies of family connection over distance.

Child-Computer Interaction (CCI) research prioritises children's participation in the design process to inform design outcomes, while less attention is paid to framing design problems. Our study explores how children aged 4-5 years can better understand complex environmental problems through our storying-roleplay approach, a co-design method aimed at shifting children's thinking from absolutist views toward thinking about relationships, interdependence and win-win solutions. The method involves eliciting children's stories, creating characters, designing probes and engaging in roleplay to collaboratively reframe complex problem space. This research contributes to current discussions on children and environmental sustainability in CCI by: (i) introducing storying-roleplay as a method to co-design with young children to develop skills for better understanding complex problems, (ii) fostering children's participation in the earlier stages of design process and (iii) highlighting the potentials for co-designing relational technologies with young children.

We present phenology circles, a method to deepen relations human and more-than-human in the backstage of participatory design processes. To illustrate the method, we reflect on over two years of activity in an online, global gardening community of practice (our phenology circle) initiated to coordinate and communicate with participants in the backstage of our research. Related to our research aims, the community was initiated to attune ourselves to the rhythms and interrelations of other species and between one another. Through this approach, we better understood interaction and deepened relations between humans and the more-than-human (e.g., plants, animals, spirits). The community (N=42) has shared over 1,200 images and textual posts regarding thoughts about the environment, concerns, and experiences. Reflecting on activity of eight core members, we identified shifts from scientific-natured posts to imbue sentience and storytelling, making possible a variety of cross-cultural and symbiotic encounters to appear in our online site and fostering community to encounter and embrace difference. Phenology circles illuminate more-than-human concerns intertwined with different human values and beliefs. We discuss the value of science, sentience and storytelling, reflect on facilitation, and illustrate a design pathway that links the backstage to frontstage design activities.

Human-nature relations are formed by the social and economic forces underlying local, physical places. Yet, many citizen science platforms are designed for national or global nature data collection. How local knowledge of wildlife can be effectively assembled to support this is an open question. This study explored what a localised nature network might look like and how to design for what people care about, notice, record, and share. We undertook research with 14 participants in an inner-city location, using interviews and a variety of technology probes. We found that participants’ social and physical boundaries, values regarding family and community, and diverse questions impacted human-nature relations and nature data collection. Speculated physical-digital networks indicated novel combinations of platforms and technologies to drive ongoing engagement and learning. This study contributes insight into how nature data is formed by the realities of locality, and how a fractured nature/data landscape might be mended.

AI-driven commercial innovations and the digital disruptions they create, tend to accelerate faster than assistive technologies, and are rarely designed with inclusion and diversity in mind. We explore the joint value of research through design and co-design to give a voice to users with intellectual disability to set new directions for inclusive innovation. To do this, we present an account of, and a reflection on, the reframing that took place throughout a research program that has evolved over the last 8 years, presented through the lens of 3 case studies. These illustrate turning points in the frames of the research and its journey through the disciplinary traditions of Information Retrieval and Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The contributions of this paper are threefold. First, we contribute knowledge on the value of research through design to identify new frames for inclusive intelligent systems. Second, we extend inclusive co-design approaches to employing working prototypes that can support participant’s voice about the design of the algorithms that underpin intelligent systems. We highlight how these working prototypes nurture the importance of participation and observation. Third, we contribute new frames for inclusive information retrieval, with new perspectives on intent, particularly in the context of image search.

This study investigated Australian older adults’ response to the conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic, the adjustments they made to their activities, technology use, and social relations, to inform how technology design could be inspired by these adaptations. Online interviews revealed that some sorely missed social interactions, however, most enjoyed having a greater agency to curate their own activities and slowing down as a result of lockdown. These findings prompted us to rethink the design space of temporal design from the perspective of those craving an ongoing impact of slowness in their lives. We suggest that designing for a slower pace of life can be inspired by people’s response to life circumstances in lockdown, complementing the original concept of slow technology which seeks to intervene in a fast-paced life to encourage people to slow down and reflect. We conclude by proposing three new design pathways based on this new standpoint.

This paper presents nature fictions, a co-design approach that seeks to highlight relations between people and nonhuman stakeholders in the process of imagining sustainable futures. The work was situated in gardens, to explore nature relations in gardener's immediate surroundings and to imagine ways of combating the adverse effects human activities have on the Earth's natural systems. Our study involved design workshops with 15 gardeners, who engaged with different prompts (phenology wheel, nature cards, and paper prototypes) to provoke relational thought for creating nature fictions. Through this process, we identified three design spaces that illustrate the relevance of the nature fictions approach: 1) Community building through awareness and collaboration around nature, 2) Multispecies care in the garden, and 3) Creating balance in public spaces – From the garden to society. We discuss key tensions and anxieties, and opportunities for each design space, and we reflect on working with nature fictions and more-than-human thought.

The application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a wide range of domains comes with both high expectations of its benefits and dire predictions of misuse. While AI systems have largely been driven by a technology-centered design approach, the potential societal consequences of AI have mobilized both HCI and AI researchers towards researching human-centered artificial intelligence (HCAI). However, there remains considerable ambiguity about what it means to frame, design and evaluate HCAI. This paper presents a critical review of the large corpus of peer-reviewed literature emerging on HCAI in order to characterize what the community is defining as HCAI. Our review contributes an overview and map of HCAI research based on work that explicitly mentions the terms ‘human-centered artificial intelligence’ or ‘human-centered machine learning’ or their variations, and suggests future challenges and research directions. The map reveals the breadth of research happening in HCAI, established clusters and the emerging areas of Interaction with AI and Ethical AI. The paper contributes a new definition of HCAI, and calls for greater collaboration between AI and HCI research, and new HCAI constructs.

Urban life is increasingly disconnected from nature. How might we design for greater awareness of the life around us? We present a study of an Internet of Things (IoT) device, the Ambient Birdhouse, and sensors to learn what kinds of interactions and media supported participants’ attention to local nature, and the sharing and exploration of nature data. Eight participants used the system and took part in individual interviews and group discussions. We found that diverse media and its reproductions and transformations (remediation), presented entry points for different kinds of users to engage with nature data. Notably, ambient acoustic media presented a means of both analytic sense-making and sensitizing users to nature. Patterns of sharing illuminated relational networks, as well as the affordances and challenges of different media. We contemplate how remediation impacts engagement with both nature and nature data and what this means for the design of IoT systems.

We propose a new research framework by which the nascent discipline of human-AI teaming can be explored within experimental environments in preparation for transferal to real-world contexts. We examine the existing literature and unanswered research questions through the lens of an Agile approach to construct our proposed framework. Our framework aims to provide a structure for understanding the macro features of this research landscape, supporting holistic research into the acceptability of human-AI teaming to human team members and the affordances of AI team members. The framework has the potential to enhance decision-making and performance of hybrid human-AI teams. Further, our framework proposes the application of Agile methodology for research management and knowledge discovery. We propose a transferability pathway for hybrid teaming to be initially tested in a safe environment, such as a real-time strategy video game, with elements of lessons learned that can be transferred to real-world situations.

We present a long-term study of use of the Messaging Kettle, an Internet of Things (IOT) research prototype that augments an everyday kettle with both sensing and messaging capability and a beautiful light display in order to investigate connecting geographically distant loved ones to their family through the routine of boiling the kettle. Connection at a distance has been of sustained interest to the CHI community, and the social connection of older people is of increasing importance in recognition of ageing populations globally. However, very few novel designs in this domain have been investigated in situ or over the long term to examine whether their use sustains, and if so, how they impact communication in a relationship. The Messaging Kettle was trialled with four pairs of dispersed older mothers and adult daughters over timeframes that lasted between two months to more than two years. We observed the phenomenon ofcollaborative habituationwherein each party creatively made the technology work for them both through a combination of the gradual transformation of their everyday practices, arrangements, and living. Through developing these joint practices over time, participants expressed feelings ofeveryday togethernessthat nurture their relationship at a distance. Three of the four couples continued to use the prototype for years, beyond the initial trial. We reflect on the artful integration of features of the Messaging Kettle and the way in which these features supportedcollaborative habituation. We also reflect on lessons and implications for the design of such relational technologies.

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.

This research aims to explore how tangible technology created through co-design can be designed in a way that invites social interaction for people with intellectual disability. We conducted co-design sessions with one participant to create a sensory musical blanket. As the trials were run in a collective environment, their peers were drawn to the developing design. The design method and unique interactions are key contributions of this research.

In recent work, design researchers have sought to ensure that people with disabilities are engaged as competent and valued contributors to co-design. Yet, little is known about how to achieve this with adults with severe intellectual disabilities. Navigating design in the context of complex care practices is challenging, charged with uncertainty, and requires sustained effort of methodological and affective adjustments. To establish a respectful co-design relationship and enrich participation, we turn to Active Support (AS), an evidence-based strategy for engaging adults with severe intellectual disabilities. We present a reflective account of long-term field work that utilized the four aspects of AS, a) every moment has potential; b) graded assistance; c) little and often; d) maximizing choice and control. We discuss how these principles contribute to deepening HCI methods by ensuring interactional turns for adults with severe disabilities, revealing their unique competences, thereby shaping design direction and providing design insight.

Wildlife calls are the best witnesses to the health of ecosystems, if only we know how to listen to them. Efforts to understand and inform restoration of healthy ecosystems with environmental audio recordings languish from insufficient tools to learn and identify sounds in recordings. To address this problem, we designed and playtested the Bristle Whistle Challenge prototype with ten players. We explored how to design delightful interactions with audio for gaining awareness of nature sounds and supporting wildlife conservation through citizen science. We found that rather than presenting audio alone, it was necessary to connect sounds to other senses and experiences in creative ways to impart meaning and enhance engagement. We offer recommendations to design creative and contextual interactions with media to build awareness of nature's wonders. We call for greater efforts in interaction design to engage people with nature, which is the key to turning around our environmental crisis.

HCI has historically provided little support for moving from fieldwork insights or theories to design outcomes. Having witnessed many students struggle and then justify their designs with a form of marketing hype, we developed a supporting approach of “field theories”. A field theory is a working theory about salient interactions in a particular domain and sensitizing concepts in order to frame design investigations. It is presented visually in a field theory diagram to support succinct communication and critique. Studying use of design prototypes that have been informed by a field theory helps to reflect upon and refine the theory. In this paper we present examples from our HCI classes and reflections based on interviews with students. We discuss how field theories offer an orientation in the spirit of a ‘bricoleur’ who harnesses elements of theory and practice to produce deeper understandings and more fitting outcomes for the task at hand.

As cities grow, their people become increasingly distanced from nature except within private and public green spaces. Sensing technologies provide a means to harness curiosity about the animals living in these spaces, and possibly also connect interest to care. Yet little is known as to how people may use these technologies, or the implications for human-nature relations. To learn more, we gave commercial camera traps to ten adult participants to understand how they explored their gardens, what they wanted to learn, and what they did with this knowledge. We discovered trade-offs between control and care; the usefulness of different media and mystery; the temporalities of engaging in natural sensing practice; and a prevalence of sharing media within households. We discuss design for convivial cohabitation with the creatures in our garden. This research contributes to better human-nature relations through citizen sensing, as well as HCI for urban biodiversity conservation.

This paper investigates how making activities and participation in makerspaces supports the wellbeing and empowerment of women, particularly in making domains that are typically male-dominated. We spent six months undertaking participant observations in a women-only makerspace that runs workshops aimed at teaching women skills in using power tools and woodwork. We conducted contextual interviews with 12 workshop attendees as well as with the makerspace founder and lead instructor. Through the lens of feminist HCI and legitimate peripheral participation, we present trajectories of participation within a women-only makerspace - from beginning as a peripheral participant to becoming a competent and confident maker. We found that through structured workshops in a women-only space that actively teach making skills, the women-only makerspace works to transform the current makerspace landscape so more women can engage with these spaces and participate within them. We contribute three core qualities to foster participation: women-only but without a 'feminist' label, configuring a formal and collaborative learning environment, and reification through artefacts. Collectively these work towards new configurations of makerspaces for women that enable their participation within them, and we detail how such configurations work to create trajectories for women's participation.

Women can face barriers to participation in universal makerspace environments and are consequently underrepresented within them. Further, women have historically been excluded from learning and working with particular types of materials, such as wood. To explore how we might address these inequalities in regards to both access to makerspaces and to diverse materials, we present the wooden quilt probe. Through this probe we aimed to 1) create a makerspace environment specifically for women where they could engage with materials and tools traditionally found in more male-dominated craft environments, and 2) facilitate the sharing of stories and experiences with other women within the community center where this work took place. We contribute a rich understanding of the stories and experiences of women from the community center, and discuss the implications of the work for Interaction Design: how designers can contribute towards diversifying makerspace environments that enable women's participation within them, the benefits of intertwining storytelling and making, and the boundaries around sharing personal narratives.

Acoustic sensing has been hailed as a game-changer for detecting furtive wildlife, but uptake has been constrained by the laborious process of reviewing resultant torrents of audio data. To inform the design of interactive interfaces for reviewing audio recordings, we explored how people interact with aural and visual media about birds. We observed how twelve participants with different levels of interest in birds engaged with vocalization recordings, visualizations of bird calls, photographs, and range maps of three species. By conducting thematic analysis, we identified a variety of Challenges of Exploration and Benefits of a Media Assortment. We contribute lessons for designing to Bridge Knowledge & Context and to Facilitate Long-term Engagement with audio in ways that are fun, accessible, and informative. We provide explicit guidance for designers to diversify how citizen scientists interact with nature through audio as they move from engagement to conservation action.

In this paper, we present a case study of the iterative design of TalkingBox, a communication device designed with a person with a severe cognitive disability and his support network. TalkingBox combines graphic symbols with tangible technology to foster the use of symbolic communication by leveraging the person's strength and interest in memory matching games. In the course of designing, trialing and iterating the TalkingBox, we discovered that the design supported not only the development of symbolic communication, but also revealed new interests and strengths of our participant. TalkingBox highlighted opportunities for interactions with peers, revealed new skills in visual discrimination, and evidenced interests. These could, in turn, support staff and family to adapt their support. More importantly, TalkingBox had become a living portfolio presenting our participant with severe disability through the lens of their strengths. We discuss opportunities for research through co-design to open new avenues for future communication technologies.

This paper investigates connecting people in remote communities through nature in order to foster stewardship and conservation of endangered species. Global citizen science technologies have found success in urban, developed countries, but they typically rely on large distributed populations to gather or analyze data and do not suit sparsely populated and remote contexts. We undertook a long-term field study to iteratively co-design a tangible and playful nature engagement prototype in a remote World Heritage Area community. The prototype design fosters learning through ambient sounds as well as exploration and discovery of species through nature soundscape recordings. We found that the prototypes amplified locals' interest, became embedded in community relations and gradually led to placemaking of new engagement 'spaces' and of newer forms. We contribute lessons learned on how design can foster nature engagement and stewardship of endangered species by heeding Suchman's call for design to "enter networks of relations that make technology possible". We contribute design implications and new design foci HCI/Citizen science engagement for species conservation.

Simple smart home sensors, e.g. for temperature or light, increasingly collect seemingly inconspicuous data. Prior work has shown that human sensemaking of such sensor data can reveal domestic activities. Such sensemaking presents an opportunity to empower people to understand the implications of simple smart home sensors. To investigate, we developed and field-tested the Guess the Data method, which enabled people to use and make sense of live data from their homes and to collectively interpret and reflect on anonymized data from the homes in our study. Our findings show how participants reconstruct behavior, both individually and collectively, expose the sensitive personal data of others, and use sensor data as evidence and for lateral surveillance within the household. We discuss the potential of our method as a participatory HCI method for investigating design of the IoT and implications created by doing data work on home sensors.

Ecoacoustics draws together computer scientists and ecologists to achieve an understanding of ecosystems and wildlife using acoustic recordings of the environment. Computer scientists are challenged to manage increasingly large datasets while developing analytic and visualisation tools. Ecologists struggle to find and use tools that answer highly heterogeneous research questions. These two fields are naturally drawn together at the tool interface, however, less attention has been paid to how their practices influence tool design and use. We interviewed and collected email correspondence from four computer scientists and eight ecologists to learn how their practices indicate opportunities for reconciling difference through design. We found that different temporal rhythms, relationships to data, and data-driven questions demand tool configuration, data integration, and standardisation. This research outlines interfacing opportunities for new ecological research utilising large acoustic datasets, and also contributes to evolving HCI approaches in areas making use of big data and human-in-the-loop processes.

Expressing one's thoughts and feelings is a fundamental human need - the basis for communication and social interaction. We ask, how do minimally-verbal children on the autism spectrum express themselves? How can we better recognise instances of self-expression? And how might technologies support and encourage self-expression? To address these questions, we undertook co-design research at an autism-specific primary school with 20 children over one school year. This paper contributes six Modalities of Self-Expression, through which children self-express and convey their design insights. Each modality of self-expression can occur across two different dimensions (socio-expressive and auto-expressive) and can be of a fundamental or an integrative nature. Further, we contribute the design trajectory of a tangible ball prototype, the ExpressiBall, which - through voice, sounds, lights, and motion sensors - explores how tangible technologies can support this range of expressive modalities. Finally, we discuss the concept of Self-Expression by Design.

Traditional methods of engagement with pre-defined queries, verbal instruction and interviewing do not provide necessary means to address information-seeking behavior and visual browsing for participants with severe autism and intellectual disability. In this paper, we identify challenges and characteristics of providing effective methods to explore visual browsing and video recommender systems with one non-verbal participant with autism and intellectual disability. We contribute a case study and a reflection on a) how iterative design approaches that builds on special interests and strengths of one individual with disability can support experimental IIR research in becoming more inclusive, b) some of the ethical consideration that arise in the tensions between participation in the research and other interests and c) how flexible experimental and apparatus design can further allow participant's terms to prevail.

People of all abilities deserve to be included in the research and design of information access technologies. In this tutorial, we will explore the latest frameworks and approaches in interaction design that seek to engage and design with people with diverse cognitive abilities. Frameworks on ability-based design and respectful design suggest starting from users abilities, personalising, and engaging in co-design activities in order to truly understand users. Frameworks on design-after design and co-design beyond words provide tools and approaches to engage with users with intellectual disability, who may not be verbal, in co-design exercises. This tutorial informs participants about various frameworks and ways of enacting them in a participatory and hands-on approach.

At CHIIR 2019, Berget and MacFarlane [4] pointed out the need for ethical methodologies when involving participants with dyslexia. In this paper, we further propose that a stance of ability based design and participatory design approaches can further involve, engage and support people with intellectual disability in interactive information retrieval (IIR) research. Through a case study with an accessible prototype designed to access instructional videos, we demonstrate how an approach building on participant's interests and providing them support as part of the study design leads to ecologically valid observations. The accessible prototype makes use of images as prompts and query support, and includes social aspects. Our observations confirm that users with intellectual disability favour a visual approach to information access and interaction. The contributions of this work are primarily 1) a 2 step approach with supported participatory design approaches involving early prototypes 2) a case study of this approach to investigate information access interfaces with people with intellectual disability and 3) a reflection on the case study and applicability of the method in IIR evaluation.

Online videos are a medium of choice for young adults to access or receive information, and recent work has highlighted that it is a particularly effective medium for adults with intellectual disability, by its visual nature. Reflecting on a case study presenting fieldwork observations of how adults with intellectual disability engage with videos on the Youtube platform, we propose a framework to define and evaluate the accessibility of such large video repositories, from an informational perspective. The proposed framework nuances the concept of information accessibility from that of the accessibility of information access interfaces themselves (generally catered for under web accessibility guidelines), or that of the documents (generally covered in general accessibility guidelines). It also includes a notion of search (or browsing) accessibility, which reflects the ability to reach the document containing the information. In the context of large information repositories, this concept goes beyond how the documents are organized into how automated processes (browsing or searching) can support users. In addition to the framework we also detail specifics of document accessibility for videos. The framework suggests a multi-dimensional approach to information accessibility evaluation which includes both cognitive and sensory aspects. This framework can serve as a basis for practitioners when designing video information repositories accessible to people with intellectual disability, and extends on the information presentation guidelines such as suggested by the WCAG.

Stories on the home materialize in many different ways. Simple design scenarios of more efficient smart homes exist alongside more articulated design fictions narrating complex domestic futures. IoT toolkits can be used in co-design to narrate design stories together with people. However, there is little attention on the stories captured in the co-creation process. This paper presents a framework describing, comparing, and assessing design stories. We illustrate the framework through the comparison of the design stories captured from three divergent IoT toolkits in co-design workshops. Three dimensions characterize the design stories emerging from our inquiry: complexity (resolution and scope), likeliness (conceivability and feasibility), and implications (acceptability and consequentiality). This framework contributes towards understanding which properties of IoT toolkits support the emergence of what kind of design story. Our findings help designers to frame expectations when using IoT toolkits and to conceive IoT toolkits that support underexplored qualities of design stories.

An increasing variety of technologies are being developed to support conservation of endangered wildlife; however, comparatively little attention has been devoted to their design. We undertook three years of ethnographic fieldwork and design research with the recovery team of an endangered Australian bird (the Eastern bristlebird) to explore the team's culture and practices, as well as their perspectives on including collection and analysis of environmental acoustic recordings into their conservation praxis. Through thematic analysis, we identified the team's collective goals, culture, conservation activities, and technology use. We found that acoustic technologies have promise for supporting conservation of furtive and vocal Eastern bristlebirds. Trialing acoustic technologies also revealed that the team had strong interest in their use. We identified knowledge gaps, time constraints, and technology aversion as barriers to be overcome with future interaction design research. We offer an initial set of practical guidelines for designing technologies to support conservation.

Young adults with intellectual disability are keen users of social media. However, there is little understanding about how their skills and participation in social media might be leveraged to support further skills development. Employing a participatory approach through workshops with eleven participants and interviews with eight parents, we investigated what skills young adults desire and how they might be able to leverage their participation in YouTube and Facebook to develop these skills. We found that young adults want to develop social skills of such as playing sports or learning languages, but that leveraging social media participation to do this goes beyond their typical use, and requires both collaborative support and accessible design. Based on these findings, we propose and discuss a collaboration-in-the-loop framework that integrates support through personal networks and an accessible user interface design. We conclude with a reflection on designing to leverage participation, interests and competencies to support people with intellectual disability.

This paper presents co-design fiction as an approach to engaging users in imagining, envisioning and speculating not just on future technology but future life through co-created fictional works. Design fiction in research is often created or written by researchers. There is relatively little critical discussion of how to co-create design fictions with end-users, with the concomitant opportunities and challenges this poses. To fill this gap in knowledge, we conducted co-design fiction workshops with nine older creative writers, utilising prompts to inspire discussion and engage their imaginative writing about the trend towards tracking and monitoring older people. Their stories revealed futures of neither dystopia nor utopia but of social and moral dilemmas narrating their wish not just to "maintain their independence", but a palpable desire for adventure and very nuanced senses of how they wish to take control. We discuss inherent tensions in the control of the co-design fiction process; balancing the author's need for freedom and creativity with the researcher's desire to guide the process toward the design investigation at hand.

We introduce the IoT Un-Kit Experience, a co-design approach that engages people in exploring, designing and generating personally meaningful IoT applications and that also serves as a means to explore IoT kit design through in-home workshops. Un-Kit represents a seemingly uncompleted set of sensors, actuators and media elements that have a decontextualized appearance - unfinished state, undefined purpose and unboxed form. The approach emphasises users contemplating and experiencing the IoT elements in their familiar space through detailed and layered conversation with researchers; rather than focusing on connecting up the kit itself, thus their ideas are not constrained by the kit or their competence with it. We illustrate the approach through in-home workshops with older adults, envisioned users of IoT who have had limited voice in its conception. The Un-kit approach supported participants to lead the process and to imagine new artfully integrated designs, with personally legible interactions and aesthetic qualities that fit their desire. We offer insights for a more situated and responsive approach to design of the IoT and its constituent kits.

The increasing loss of species globally calls for effective monitoring tools and strategies to inform conservation action. The dominant approach to citizens engagement has been smart phone and platform-centric, tasking crowds to collect and analyze data. However, many critically endangered species inhabit remote areas, characterized by sparsely populated communities with poor internet connectivity. Approaches need to garner high engagement relative to population size, with data collection and knowledge synthesis suited to the local context. We conducted a field study in remote communities to understand how to enhance conservation of Bhutan's critically endangered White-bellied heron by exploring existing monitoring practices and trialing acoustic sensing technologies. We found that knowledge about the species is partial, heterogeneous, situated within and across communities and rooted in cultural beliefs. Sensors, acoustic interfaces, and playful probes provided new ways for the community to 'see' and discuss their local environment fostering them to share and grow their knowledge together. We contribute a synthesis of key considerations for designing effective participatory sensing to conserve species in remote communities.

Existing methods for researching and designing to support relationships between parents and their adult children tend to lead to designs that respect the differences between them. We conducted 14 Position Exchange Workshops with parents and their adult children, where the child has left home in recent years, aiming to explicate and confront their positions in creative and supportive ways. We designed three co-design methods (Card Sort for Me & You, Would I Lie to You? and A Magic Machine for You) to support participants to explore, understand, empathize, and design for each other. The findings show that the methods facilitated understanding, renegotiating, and reimagining their current positions. We discuss how positions can help consider both perspectives in the design process. This paper seeks to contribute (1) how the notion of positions enables generating understandings of the relationship, and (2) a set of methods influenced by position exchange, empathy, and playful engagement that help explore human relationships.

Existing co-design methods support verbal children on the autism spectrum in the design process, while their minimally-verbal peers are overlooked. We describe Co-Design Beyond Words (CDBW), an approach which merges existing co-design methods with practice-based methods from Speech and Language Therapy which are child-led and interests-based. These emphasise the rich detail that can be conveyed in the moment, through recognising occurrences of, for example, Joint Attention, Turn Taking and Imitation. We worked in an autism-specific primary school over 20 weeks with ten children, aged 5 to 8. We co-designed a playful prototype, the TangiBall, using the three iterative phases of CDBW; the Foundation Phase (preparation for interaction), the Interaction Phase (designing-and-reflecting in the moment) and the Reflection Phase (reflection-on-action). We contribute a novel co-design approach and present moments of interaction, the micro instances in design in which minimally-verbal children on the spectrum can convey meaning beyond words, through their actions, interactions, and attentional foci. These moments of interaction provide design insight, shape design direction, and reveal unique strengths, interests, and abilities.

A person with a disability has to assemble support services and technologies from different organisations in order to live well, which may require help from family. We call this assembling of services and technologies personal infrastructuring, the process of learning about how to navigate the world, what support is available, and how to obtain and design new support through various organisational infrastructures. Such infrastructures include disability services organisations, the health sector, community organisations, and friend and family networks. Our vision was to explore how a person with a disability might engage in design with volunteer designers to meet their unique needs that were not met by their existing infrastructure of organisations, products and services. Through codesign with two people and their families, we developed design artefacts such as user profiles and video stories to support communication, mutual learning, need finding and need expression. We discovered that these design artefacts were used beyond their immediate purposes of design to further support their personal infrastructuring. In this paper, we discuss how understandings of infrastructure and infrastructuring from Science and Technology Studies and Information Systems translate into familial contexts and the concept of personal infrastructuring.

We report on a participatory design project that explored the use of child-created Personas to enable child designers to empathize with other children thereby contributing multiple divergent perspectives. The ongoing project aims to promote reading and creative writing skills among young children in Namibia. For decades libraries worldwide have been the key actors in fostering reading. Hence, in order to maintain their relevance, they are being re-conceptualized to cater for new needs and aspirations in the 21st century. In Namibia, dysfunctional public and school library services are lagging behind in this renovation effort, and are not contributing to the promotion of a reading culture. In an ongoing collaboration with a school in Windhoek, to design and implement an interactive tech library, 19 young learners engaged in weekly participatory design workshops to redesign their own school library. The children first created four distinct Personas for which they then modelled spaces and technologies. This paper reflects on the techniques used to enable children to become active design partners and to gain an understanding of designing for other children.

Digital technologies to support children on the autism spectrum often offer predefined content for modelling, communicating and training. However, children may not relate to the content, and it may not match their own personal interests and motivations. This paper investigates the use of MyWord, an interest-based, child-led technology, as an exploratory probe. This audio-visual dictionary app supports a child to build their own personalised catalogue of favourite words, images and audio over time. We undertook a field study over two school terms in an autism-specific primary school with 12 minimally-verbal children aged 5 to 8 and their teachers and speech therapists. Findings indicate that creating dictionary entries involved processes of personal choice, representation of the self and interests, and dynamic action and play. Use of personally and contextually relevant words enhanced engagement, interaction and self-expression. We contribute a novel, flexible, interest-based technology, and reflections on its use in autism-specific school contexts. We highlight the importance of the child's lived experience and holistic child-led approaches to technology design.

We introduce the Ambient Birdhouse, a novel IoT design for the home that seeks to encourage awareness and discovery of birds outside. People increasingly have routines and technologies that disconnect them from nature. Moreover birds are hard to come to know, seen but not heard, heard but not seen, or simply around when we are not. The Ambient Birdhouse aims to reconcile these positions, by using local bird media to leverage people's playfulness and curiosity, calmly sustain interest over time and ultimately to garner interest and engagement in nature and conservation projects. We trialled the Ambient Birdhouse with five families. Key findings are that the playful nature of the Birdhouse has an immediate grasp on children, and through them on the rest of the family. Children were prompt to learn bird calls, and invented and played games that involved the Birdhouse. Learning strategies emerged spontaneously from family routines and arrangements, with each family creating different moments and spaces for learning.

Design research is generative, intuitive, experiential, and tactical. Documenting the design research process helps to communicate these decisions, judgements, and values that are embodied in design products. Yet, practices for documenting design research are underreported in the CHI community, particularly for immersive design research field studies. We contribute the "Debrief O'Clock" fieldnote practice for documenting design research field studies, comprising collaborative discussion sessions and the production of written research accounts. We show how the Debrief O'Clock practice emerged in the context of a Digital Community Noticeboard project with a very remote Australian Aboriginal community, and explain three key purposes of Debrief O'Clock as: 1) an early stage data recording and analysis process; 2) a tactical manoeuvre in responsive project planning; and 3) a mechanism for personal debriefing and reflexivity. We conclude with a series of open practical, ethical, and methodological questions to advance the discussion of design research documentation practices.

Monitoring the environment with acoustic sensors is now practical; sensors are sold as commercial devices, storage is cheap, and the field of ecoacoustics is recognized as an effective way to scale monitoring of the environment. However, a pressing challenge faced in many eScience projects is how to manage, analyze, and visualize very large data so that scientists can benefit, with ecoacoustic data presenting its own particular challenges. This paper presents a new zoomable interactive visualization interface for the exploration of environmental audio data. The interface is a new tool in the Acoustic Workbench, an ecoacoustics software platform built for managing environmental audio data. This Google Maps like interface for audio data, enables zooming in and out of audio data by incorporating specialized, multiresolution, visual representations of audio data into the workbench website. The `zooming' visualization allows scientists to surface the structure, detail, and patterns in content that would otherwise be opaque to them, from scales of seconds through to weeks of data. The Ecosounds instance of the Acoustic Workbench contains 52 years (108 TB) of audio data, from 1016 locations, which results in a 180 million-tile, 8.3 terapixel visualization. The design and implementation of this novel big audio data visualization is presented along with some design considerations for storing visualization tiles.

Technologies to support children with autism tend to use predefined content to enhance specific skills, such as verbal communication or emotion recognition. Few mobilise the child's own (often very specific) interests, strengths and capabilities. Digital technologies offer opportunities for children to personalise learning with their own content, following their own interests and enabling their self-expression. This project sought to engage children to record and express their own interests within their contexts of support - the home and the classroom. The vehicle for self-expression was an audio-visual calendaring app called MeCalendar. Implementation was kept open-ended to allow teachers to use it in ways that best fit with their existing embedded practices. In this paper we report on how the prototype has been appropriated in two classrooms by teachers in an autism-specific school setting with children aged 6 to 7. Our contribution is an understanding of how technologies for self-expression led to enhanced verbal communication, positive reinforcement through video modelling, engagement in class tasks and enhanced social interaction. Children appropriated the design in unimagined ways, leading them to self-scaffold and to catalyse their confidence in social interaction and self-expression. Teachers played an integral role in appropriating the design in the classroom, specifically through their in-depth knowledge of each child and their individual needs, strengths and interests.

This paper presents the concept of technology individuation and explores its role in design. Individuation expresses how, over time, a technology becomes personal and intimate, unique in purpose, orchestrated in place, and how people eventually come to rely on it to sustain connection with others. We articulate this concept as a critical vantage point for designing augmented everyday objects and the Internet of Things. Individuation foregrounds aspects of habituation, routines and arrangements that through everyday practices reveal unique meaning, reflect self-identity and support agency.

We propose the concept of "Situational When", an approach to understanding time in interface design not as a point on a calendar or clock, but as a set of converging circumstances that constitute "the time" for happenings to take place. Time is encoded both explicitly and implicitly in designed products. However, many technologies propagate business-centric, modernist values such as scheduling and efficiency, and marginalize broader socio-cultural aspects on which many activities are nonetheless contingent, e.g. the right people, the right weather conditions, and the right vibe. We derive our reflections from a case study of a cross-cultural digital noticeboard designed with an Australian Aboriginal community. Attention to the situational when opens up new possibilities for design that put greater emphasis on the social and relational aspects of time, the situational insights embodied in local narratives, and the tangible (e.g. people) and intangible (e.g. energy) circumstances that together make up the "right" time.

Passive acoustic recording has great potential for monitoring soniferous endangered and cryptic species. However, this approach requires analysis of long duration environmental acoustic recordings that span months or years. There is a variety of approaches to analysing acoustic data. However, it is unclear which approaches are best suited for monitoring of endangered species in the wild. Specifically, this study is undertaking acoustic monitoring of the critically endangered White-bellied Heron (Ardea insignis) in Bhutan. Four different acoustic analysis methods are investigated in terms of their detection accuracy, involvement of human experts, and overall utility to ecologists for target species monitoring work. Our experimental results show that human pattern detection using a visualization technique has detection performance on par with a cluster-based recogniser, while a machine learning classifier implemented using the same acoustic features suffers from very low precision. Further, specific cases of false positives and false negatives by the different methods are investigated and discussed in terms of their overall utility for ecological monitoring. Based on our experimental results, we demonstrate how an integrated semi-automated approach of human visual pattern analysis with a recogniser is a robust system for acoustic monitoring of target species.

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 contends that problems such as poverty and economic disadvantage are equally social in their nature as they are economic. As such, a social frame of reference is helpful in design. Using a qualitative approach, the authors studied the ways that 13 Australian households living on a low income manage, organize, and interact in their everyday financial activities and what this means for designers of technology that might assist them with this. The article highlights the highly social nature of many practices concerned with managing and saving money. Implications are provided for how these practices may be supported through fostering social connections and how informal and sharing economies may be leveraged to provide value to those experiencing financial hardship. An argument is made that classifying an otherwise heterogeneous population based on income alone is reductive. In response, the authors propose a rationale for amending the “low income” demographic classifier, incorporating a broader measure they tentatively term Social–financial Connectedness, which captures the importance of social connections in overall financial well-being and identifies people’s capacity to live well and share, irrespective of their financial circumstances.

There are two distinct bodies of literature on the Internet of Things, one that derives from a technical perspective, while the other comes from a human perspective. From a technical perspective, sensors can automatically detect physical activity, thus enabling elderly people to live independently, while sensors in essence check that they are active, remind them to take their pills, and so on. From a human perspective, people seek control over their lives, good health, social connection, and a sense of well-being that comes from having purpose and feeling competent in daily routines. So are technologies meant to enable users to stay in control of their lives and manage their relations and preferred routines, or do they undermine it, making elderly people feel subjects of surveillance and incompetent, disrupting their daily arrangements? And is there a middle path that we might take in design that creates innovative technologies that are aesthetic in form and function and empowering to use? In this paper, we offer a framework and examples of designs that bridge these perspectives.

Smart everyday objects could support the wellbeing, independent living and social connectedness of ageing people, but their successful adoption depends upon them fitting with their skills, values and goals. Many technologies fail in this respect. Our work is aimed at designs that engage older people by building on their individual affective attachment to habituated objects and leveraging, from a participatory design perspective, the creative process through which people continuously adapt their homes and tools to their own lifestyle. We contribute a novel analytic framework based on an analysis of related research on appropriation and habituated objects. It identifies steps in appropriation from inspection to performance and habituation. We test this framework with the preliminary testing of an augmented habituated object, a messaging kettle. While only used in one home so far, its daily use has provoked many thoughts, scenarios and projections about use by friends, both practical, utopian and dystopian.

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.

In this paper we discuss results of a field study focused on understanding the ways money and financial issues are handled within family settings. Families develop 'systems' or methods through which they coordinate and manage their everyday financial activities. Through an analysis of our fieldwork data collected from fifteen families, we provide several examples of such systems, highlighting their qualities and illustrating how such systems come to support the handling of financial activities in the home. Our results show that these systems are developed with a careful consideration of familial values, relationships and routines; and incorporate the use of physical and digital tools. Consequently, we suggest that design should consider the use and non-use of technology when supporting household financial management, taking into account the richness of families' existing organically formed practices surrounding financial systems. Finally, our findings point to the fact that financial management in the domestic setting is socially organized and is closely connected to supporting everyday household activities.

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.

A prototype "messaging kettle" is described. The connected kettle aims to foster communication and engagement with an older friend or relative who lives remotely, during the routine of boiling the kettle. We describe preliminary encounters and findings from demonstrating a working prototype in morning tea gatherings of people in their 50s-late 70s and from introducing it into the homes of two people in their 80s who live on another continent. Key findings are that: The concept of keeping in touch around a "habituated object" such as a kettle was well received; Simple and varied interaction modalities that allow asymmetric forms of communication are needed; Designing for use across different time zones requires attention; And, that even when augmenting a habituated object, the process of introduction, appropriation and habituation still needs significant attention and investigation.

In this paper we contribute to the growing body of research into the use and design of technology in the kitchen. This research aims to identify opportunities for designing technologies that may augment existing cooking traditions and in particular familial recipe sharing practices. Using ethnographic techniques, we identify the homemade cookbook as a significant material and cultural artifact in the family kitchen. We report on findings from our study by providing descriptive accounts of various homemade cookbooks, and offer design considerations for digitally augmenting homemade cookbooks.

This paper explores an emerging paradigm for HCI design research based primarily upon engagement, reciprocity and doing. Much HCI research begins with an investigatory and analytic ethnographic approach before translating to design. Design may come much later in the process and may never benefit the community that is researched. However in many settings it is difficult for researchers to access the privileged ethnographer position of observer and investigator. Moreover rapid ethnographic research often does not seem the best or most appropriate course of action. We draw upon a project working with a remote Australian Aboriginal community to illustrate an alternative approach in Indigenous research, where the notion of reciprocity is first and foremost. We argue that this can lead to sustainable designs, valid research and profound innovation.

Within HCI, aging is often viewed in terms of designing assistive technologies to improve the lives of older people, such as those who are suffering from frailty or memory loss. Our research adopts a very different approach, reframing the relationship in terms of wisdom, creativity and invention. We ran a series of workshops where groups of retirees, aged between early 60s and late 80s, used the MaKey MaKey inventor's toolkit. We asked them to think about inventing the future and suggest ideas for new technologies. Our findings showed that they not only rose to the challenge but also mastered the technology, collaborated intensely together while using it and freely and at length discussed their own, their family's and others' relationship with technology. We discuss the value of empowering people in this way and consider what else could be invented to enable more people to be involved in the design and use of creative technologies.

The advent of the Internet of Things creates an interest in how people might interrelate through and with networks of internet enabled objects. With an emphasis on fostering social connection and physical activity among older people, this preliminary study investigated objects that people over the age of 65 years viewed as significant to them. We conducted contextual interviews in people's homes about their significant objects in order to understand the role of the objects in their lives, the extent to which they fostered emotional and social connections and physical activity, and how they might be augmented through internet connection.

We explore relationships between habits and technology interaction by reporting on older people's experience of the Kinect for Xbox. We contribute to theoretical and empirical understandings of habits in the use of technology to inform understanding of the habitual qualities of our interactions with computing technologies, particularly systems exploiting natural user interfaces. We situate ideas of habit in relation to user experience and usefulness in interaction design, and draw on critical approaches to the concept of habit from cultural theory to understand the embedded, embodied, and situated contexts in our interactions with technologies. We argue that understanding technology habits as a process of reciprocal habituation in which people and technologies adapt to each other over time through design, adoption, and appropriation offers opportunities for research on user experience and interaction design within human-computer interaction, especially as newer gestural and motion control interfaces promise to reshape the ways in which we interact with computers.

This paper investigates engaging experienced birders, as volunteer citizen scientists, to analyze large recorded audio datasets gathered through environmental acoustic monitoring. Although audio data is straightforward to gather, automated analysis remains a challenging task; the existing expertise, local knowledge and motivation of the birder community can complement computational approaches and provide distinct benefits. We explored both the culture and practice of birders, and paradigms for interacting with recorded audio data. A variety of candidate design elements were tested with birders.

One of the major challenges in the design of social technologies is the evaluation of their qualities of use and how they are appropriated over time. While the field of HCI abounds in short-term exploratory design and studies of use, relatively little attention has focused on the continuous development of prototypes longitudinally and studies of their emergent use. We ground the exploration and analysis of use in the everyday world, embracing contingency and open-ended use, through the use of a continuously-available exploratory prototype. Through examining use longitudinally, clearer insight can be gained of realistic, non-novelty usage and appropriation into everyday use.

In this paper, we introduce a prototype system designed to support mobile group socializing that has been appropriated for everyday use by 150 users over 18 months. The system supports cross-channel communication, allowing users to participate in group conversations using text messaging, instant messaging, email and the web. It does this with the "console," a uniform text-based syntax that enables the prototype to be used over a variety of mediums.

In this research I explore what elements there may be in common between tangible interactive-technology works that successfully engage their participants. An exploration of existing methods for obtaining useful evaluations for non-use and ambiguous environments forms a part of the discussion.

Designers and artists have integrated recent advances in interactive, tangible and ubiquitous computing technologies to create new forms of interactive environments in the domains of work, recreation, culture and leisure. Many designs of technology systems begin with the workplace in mind, and with function, ease of use, and efficiency high on the list of priorities. [1] These priorities do not fit well with works designed for an interactive art environment, where the aims are many, and where the focus on utility and functionality is to support a playful, ambiguous or even experimental experience for the participants. To evaluate such works requires an integration of art-criticism techniques with more recent Human Computer Interaction (HCI) methods, and an understanding of the different nature of engagement in these environments. This paper begins a process of mapping a set of priorities for amplifying engagement in interactive art installations. I first define the concept of ludic engagement and its usefulness as a lens for both design and evaluation in these settings. I then detail two fieldwork evaluations I conducted within two exhibitions of interactive artworks, and discuss their outcomes and the future directions of this research.

The University of Queensland has recently established a new design-focused, studio-based computer science degree. The Bachelor of Information Environments degree augments the core courses from the University's standard CS degree with a stream of design courses and integrative studio-based projects undertaken every semester. The studio projects integrate and reinforce learning by requiring students to apply the knowledge and skills gained in other courses to open-ended real-world design projects. The studio model is based on the architectural studio and involves teamwork, collaborative learning, interactive problem solving, presentations and peer review. This paper describes the degree program, its curriculum and rationale, and reports on experiences in the first year of delivery.

There has been an increasing interest in objects within the HCI field particularly with a view to designing tangible interfaces. However, little is known about how people make sense of objects and how objects support thinking. This paper presents a study of groups of engineers using physical objects to prototype designs, and articulates the roles that physical objects play in supporting their design thinking and communications. The study finds that design thinking is heavily dependent upon physical objects, that designers are active and opportunistic in seeking out physical props and that the interpretation and use of an object depends heavily on the activity. The paper discusses the trade-offs that designers make between speed and accuracy of models, and specificity and generality in choice of representations. Implications for design of tangible interfaces are discussed.