Can self-tracking technology be designed to help us learn how our everyday activities align with our values? Existing personal informatics systems can help track time use, but rarely explicitly connect time use with personal abstract values. We designed, built, and deployed eValuATE, a personal informatics system that helps individuals reconstruct their everyday activities, annotate those activities with their values, and visualize relationships between their activities and values. Fifteen participants used the system in a think-aloud study, a 2-4 week deployment, and a closing interview. The system helped participants refine their own values, understand how those values were supported through their daily activities, view their time use differently, and in many cases change their behavior to better align with their values. We discuss design considerations for self-tracking abstract values, motivate a shift towards short term life studies over perpetual self-tracking, and present a multi-level reflection model for personal informatics system design.

While study abroad experiences have valuable benefits for students, computer and information science students study abroad at much lower rates than in many other disciplines. This paper presents a new study abroad course designed to increase the opportunities for computer and information science students to study abroad. ''Defamiliarizing Data: The Ethnography and Design of Making Data Strange'' supports a breadth of learning objectives in computer and information science that are specifically tailored to the global and cross-cultural context, including supporting the development of intercultural competence, examining the opportunities and pitfalls of the globalization of technology, and applying techniques of defamiliarization to the study and design of computing systems.

Intercultural competence is a critical area of focus in higher education as it enables individuals to navigate and succeed in culturally diverse environments. This crucial competence is essential for both personal development and professional success, particularly in information and computer science, where students are likely to contribute to the creation of computing and information systems that will have global impact. Study abroad programs are designed to provide students with first-hand exposure to different cultures, languages, and ways of life, making them an ideal setting for developing intercultural competence. And yet, there is relatively little research about study abroad programs in computer and information science or about the development of intercultural competence in students in these fields. This research begins to address this gap by undertaking a study of the development of each of the six components of intercultural competence through analysis of student reflections about their intercultural experiences with data during an information science study abroad course.

There has been a call to develop more culturally sensitive designs for mental health technologies to ensure that the needs of diverse communities are met. We conducted an interview study with multiple stakeholders-clients from the Hispanic community (N=10), mental health therapists (N=10), and technology designers (N=5)-to identify benefits and challenges of accessing and using teletherapy for the Hispanic community. We identified four use and access barriers: connectivity and digital literacy barriers, safety barriers, technology exploitation barriers, and cultural and language barriers. We then discuss how these barriers could be addressed by using five elements derived from culturally competent frameworks from the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) and the American Psychological Association (APA). We offer design guidelines for developing culturally sensitive technologies based on each of the five elements of culturally competent mental health technologies.

With the rise of remote and hybrid work after COVID-19, there is growing interest in understanding remote workers’ experiences and designing digital technology for the future of work within the field of HCI. To gain a holistic understanding of how remote workers navigate the blurred boundary between work and home and how designers can better support their boundary work, we employ humanistic geography as a lens. We engaged in co-speculative design practices with 11 remote workers in the US, exploring how future technologies might sustainably enhance participants’ work and home lives in remote/hybrid arrangements. We present the imagined technologies that resulted from this process, which both reinforce remote workers’ existing boundary work practices through everyday routines/rituals and reclaim the notion of home by fostering independence, joy, and healthy relationships. Our discussions with participants inform implications for designing digital technologies that promote sustainability in the future remote/hybrid work landscape.

Learning personalized self-management routines is pivotal for people with type 1 diabetes (T1D), particularly early in diagnosis. Context-aware technologies, such as hybrid closed-loop (HCL) insulin pumps, are important tools for diabetes self-management. However, clinicians have observed that practices using these technologies involve significant individual differences. We conducted interviews with 20 adolescents and young adults who use HCL insulin pump systems for managing T1D, and we found that these individuals leverage both technological and non-technological means to maintain situational awareness about their condition. We discuss how these practices serve to infrastructure their self-management routines, including medical treatment, diet, and glucose measurement-monitoring routines. Our study provides insights into adolescents' and young adults' lived experiences of using HCL systems and related technology to manage diabetes, and contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how the HCI community can support the contextualized management of diabetes through technology design.

Clinical group bereavement therapy often promotes narrative sharing as a therapeutic intervention to facilitate grief processing. Increasingly, people turn to social media to express stories of loss and seek support surrounding bereavement experiences, specifically, the loss of loved ones from suicide. This paper reports the results of a computational linguistic analysis of narrative expression within an online suicide bereavement support community. We identify distinctive characteristics of narrative posts (compared to non-narrative posts) in linguistic style. We then develop and validate a machine-learning model for tagging narrative posts at scale and demonstrate the utility of applying this machine-learning model to a more general grief support community. Through comparison, we validate our model's narrative tagging accuracy and compare the proportion of narrative posts between the two communities we have analyzed. Narrative posts make up about half of all total posts in these two grief communities, demonstrating the importance of narrative posts to grief support online. Finally, we consider how the narrative tagging tool presented in this study can be applied to platform design to more effectively support people expressing the narrative sharing of grief in online grief support spaces.

A grand challenge for computing is to better understand fundamental human needs and their satisfaction. In this work, we design a personal informatics technology probe that scaffolds reflection on how time-use satisfies Max-Neef’s fundamental needs of being, having, doing, and interacting via self-aspects, relationships and organizations, activities, and environments. Through a combination of a think-aloud study (N = 10) and a week-long in situ deployment (N = 7), participants used the probe to complete self- aspect elicitation and Day Reconstruction Method tasks. Participants then interacted with network visualizations of their daily lives, and discovered insights about their lives. During the study, we collected a dataset of 662 activities annotated with need satisfaction ratings. Despite challenges in operationalizing a theory of need through direct elicitation from individuals, personal informatics systems show potential as a participatory and individually meaningful approach for understanding need satisfaction in everyday life.

Technology plays an increasingly pivotal role in mediating mental health support in people's everyday lives. However, it is not clear how that mediation is occurring, to what end, and what technologies are implicated. In this study, we examine these questions with a mixed-methods analysis of conversations among participants in several Bipolar Disorder (BD) communities on Reddit. Analyzing posts produced over four years, we identify a wide variety of technologies that people employ to manage their mental conditions, such as communication technologies, online communities and tracking tools. Using this taxonomy of technologies as a framework, we then summarize three technology-mediated management strategies that these technologies enable, including serving as community, episode, and information mediators. We argue that with a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of people's in situ technology use, we can identify research and design opportunities for designing human-centered technologies to help people manage mental health challenges more effectively.

Graduate students are facing a mental health crisis due to a combination of individual, community, and societal factors. Many existing stress management interventions engage with one factor at a time, typically focusing on providing a user with data about their stress state. We conducted co-design workshops with graduate students who work closely together to explore their strategies for managing stress and to learn about what types of technologies they envision to help address their stress. Using Ecological Systems Theory as an conceptual framework, our analysis of the designs and discussions from these workshops contributes an expanded design space for stress management—one that foregrounds the affordances and challenges of designing interventions that cut across ecological systems levels along with designs that approach stress management using a broader diversity of strategies: controlling, disconnecting, and normalizing stress. We argue that this expanded design space embraces a more holistic and human approach to designing stress management technologies.

Personal informatics (PI) systems have been developed to support reflection. While reflection is considered an indispensable activity in PI use, how and when reflection occurs is still under-studied. In this paper, we present an analysis of the interactive features of 123 commercial PI apps, revealing that reflective practices are unevenly supported. The lack of features that encourage user-driven reflection, scaffolding for setting goals and configuring data collection and presentation, and consideration of wider implications stand to limit meaning-making and frustrate nuanced insight generation based on lived experiences. Based on our findings, we discuss how reflection is currently misrepresented in personal informatics tools, identify and characterize the gaps between theoretical research on reflection and interface features in current apps, and offer suggestions about how reflection could be better supported.

We present the research area of personal dream informatics: studying the self-information systems that support dream engagement and communication between the dreaming self and the wakeful self. Through a survey study of 281 individuals primarily recruited from an online community dedicated to dreaming, we develop a dream-information systems view of dreaming and dream tracking as a type of self-information system. While dream-information systems are characterized by diverse tracking processes, motivations, and outcomes, they are universally constrained by the ephemeral dreamset—the short period of time between waking up and rapid memory loss of dream experiences. By developing a system dynamics model of dreaming we highlight feedback loops that serve as high leverage points for technology designers, and suggest a variety of design considerations for crafting technology that best supports dream recall, dream tracking, and dreamwork for nightmare relief and personal development.

The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed the nature of work by shifting most in-person work to a predominantly remote modality as a way to limit the spread of the coronavirus. In the process, the shift to working-from-home rapidly forced the large-scale adoption of groupware technologies. Although prior empirical research examined the experience of working-from-home within small-scale groups and for targeted kinds of work, the pandemic provides HCI and CSCW researchers with an unprecedented opportunity to understand the psycho-social impacts of a universally mandated work-from-home experience rather than an autonomously chosen one. Drawing on boundary theory and a methodological approach grounded in humanistic geography, we conducted a qualitative analysis of Reddit data drawn from two work-from-home-related subreddits between March 2020 and January 2021. In this paper, we present a characterization of the challenges and solutions discussed within these online communities for adapting work to a hybrid or fully remote modality, managing reconfigured work-life boundaries, and reconstructing the home's sense of place to serve multiple, sometimes conflicting roles. We discuss how these findings suggest an emergent interplay among adapted work practice, reimagined physical (and virtual) spaces, and the establishment and continual re-negotiation of boundaries as a means for anticipating the long-term impact of COVID on future conceptualizations of productivity and work.

Global crowdsourcing teams who conduct humanitarian response use temporal narratives as a sensemaking device when time is a critical element of the data story. In dynamic situations in which the flow of online information is rapid, fluid, and disordered, the process of how distributed teams construct a temporal narrative is not well understood nor well supported by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Here, we examine an intense need for temporal sensemaking: time- and safety-critical information work during the 2017 Hurricane Maria crisis response in Puerto Rico. Our analysis of semi-structured interviews reveals how members of a global digital humanitarian group, The Standby Task Force (SBTF), use a process of triage, evaluation, negotiation, and synchronization to construct collective temporal narratives in their high-tempo, distributed information work. Informed by these empirical insights, we reflect on the design implications for cloud-based, collaborative ICTs used in time- and safety-critical remote work.

Personal health informatics are increasingly used in the long-term management of bipolar disorder and other serious mental illnesses. These systems help individuals and members of their support networks track and stabilize important social rhythms. In this study, we presented mental health professionals with nine design concepts for personal informatics systems to support interpersonal and social rhythm therapy. These designs, derived from prior empirical findings about patients’ data practices, utilize social interfaces to support the social ecologies critical to relational recovery in bipolar disorder. Designs included features for sharing data in dynamic social support systems, custom variables, commenting, co-tracking, and data-driven action plans. Qualitative analysis of clinicians’ feedback yielded design recommendations for mental health informatics, such as supporting all cognitive states of the multiplicative patient and the interactions between these states and patient–clinician interfaces. Diversity in clinical practice also necessitates application flexibility and careful integration with existing workflows.

We use a sociotechnical perspective to expand upon prior characterizations of deploying end-to-end urban sensor networks that focus primarily on the technical aspects of such systems. Via exploratory, semi-structured interviews with those deploying a number of urban sensor networks in a single American city, we identify ways that human decision-making and collaborative processes influence how these infrastructures are built. We synthesize these findings into a framework in which sociotechnical factors show up across the phases of data collection, management, analysis, and impacts within smart city projects. Each phase can display variability in immediacy, automation, geographic scope, and ownership. Finally, we use our situated work to discuss a generalizable tension within smart city projects between cross-domain data integration and fragmentation and provide implications for CSCW research, the design of smart city data platforms, and municipal policy.

Numerous studies have highlighted a range of potential benefits of teletherapy for clients. Nonetheless, researchers have found that many therapists are reluctant to adopt teletherapy in their work practice. There is a dearth of research about how therapists have appropriated telehealth platforms, either to understand teletherapy practice or to understand the challenges and opportunities for system design. The COVID-19 pandemic offers an unfortunate but unique opportunity to learn more about the experiences of therapists who use a range of therapeutic interventions with a range of client populations. In this work, we explore the following research question: in what ways do telehealth platforms support and challenge the work of teletherapy? We present results of semi-structured interviews conducted with 14 mental health therapists during the first six months of the pandemic in the United States. We present a descriptive account of their experiences as well as a discussion of the ways in which the multi-layered and interdependent nature of two facets of therapeutic work---the therapeutic alliance and the therapeutic interventions---made the transition to computer-supported cooperative work particularly challenging. We then offer a suite of design implications for systems that better support the nuanced and unique work of teletherapy.

Research in personal informatics (PI) calls for systems to sup- port social forms of tracking, raising questions about how privacy can and should support intentionally sharing sensitive health information. We focus on the case of personal data related to the self-tracking of bipolar disorder (BD) in order to explore the ways in which disclosure activities intersect with other privacy experiences. While research in HCI of- ten discusses privacy as a disclosure activity, this does not reflect the ways in which privacy can be passively experienced. In this paper we broaden conceptions of privacy by defining transparency experiences and contributing factors in contrast to disclosure activities and preferences. Next, we ground this theoretical move in empirical analysis of personal narratives shared by people managing BD. We discuss the resulting emer- gent model of transparency in terms of implications for the design of socially-enabled PI systems. CAUTION: This paper contains references to experiences of mental illness, including self-harm, depression, suicidal ideation, etc.

Issues of social identity, attitudes towards self-disclosure, and potentially biased approaches to what is considered "typical" or "normal" are critical factors when designing visualizations for personal informatics systems. This is particularly true when working with vulnerable populations like those who self-track to manage serious mental illnesses like bipolar disorder (BD). We worked with individuals diagnosed with BD to 1) better understand sense-making challenges related to the representation and interpretation of personal data and 2) probe the benefits, risks, and limitations of participatory approaches to designing personal data visualizations that better reflect their lived experiences. We describe our co-design process, present a series of emergent visual encoding schemas resulting from these activities, and report on the assessment of these speculative designs by participants. We conclude by summarizing important considerations and implications for designing personal data visualizations for (and with) people who self-track to manage serious mental illness.

Temporal coordination endures as a central topic in computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) because information systems still struggle to adequately support varying representations of time in the context of collaborations that areboth temporally and geographically dispersed. Moreover, the adaptive practices of these broadly dispersed groups are still not well understood. We ask:How do globally distributed teams temporally coordinate to accomplish their work? We examine an extreme case of online temporal coordination: high-tempo information curation about the urgent humanitarian crisis following the 2017 Hurricane Maria landfall in Puerto Rico. Our analysis of synchronous chat transcripts and data artifacts produced by The Standby Task Force reveals how this digital humanitarian group establishes temporal coordination through different shared understandings of time relative to the crisis, the globally distributed work, and the collaborative information technologies. We make four contributions from our analysis: First, we developed a pluritemporal analytical framework that describes different forms of socially constructed time and disambiguates their meaning in talk. Next, we present empirical evidence of how this distributed team establishes shared temporal orders to collectively orient their work in time. Then, we describe how they reconcile multiple and conflicting instances of sociotemporal "disorder'' to enable productive work. Last, we reflect on the design implications for collaborative information systems informed by this work.

Personal informatics systems for supporting health largely grew out of a "self"-centric orientation: self-tracking, self-reflection, self-knowledge, self-experimentation, self-improvement. Health management, however, even when self-driven, is inherently social and depends on a person's direct relationships and broader sociocultural contexts, as an emerging line of research is coming to recognize, study, and support. This is particularly true in the case of mental health. In this paper, we engage with individuals managing the serious mental illness bipolar disorder and members of their support circles to (a) identify key social relations and the roles they play in condition management, (b) characterize patients' complex interactions with these relations (e.g., positive or negative, direct or peripheral, steady or unstable), and (c) understand how personal informatics mediates these recovery relations. Based on these insights, we offer a model of this social ecology, along with design implications for personal informatics systems that are sensitive to these interpersonal contexts.

Leaderboards, a common gamification technique, are used to enhance engagement through social comparisons. Prior research has demonstrated the overall utility of leaderboards but has not examined their effectiveness when individuals are ranked at particular levels or when the technique is applied in different application domains, such as social networking, fitness, or productivity. In this paper, we present a survey study investigating how preferences for leaderboards change based on individual differences (personality traits), ranking, social scoping, and application domains. Our results show that a respondent's position on the leaderboard had important effects on their perception of the leaderboard and the surrounding app, and that participants rated leaderboards most favorably in fitness apps and least favorably in social networking contexts. More extraverted people reported more positive experiences with leaderboards despite their ranking or the application domain. We present design implications for creating leaderboards targeted at different domains and for different audiences.

While motivational affordances are widely used to enhance user engagement in "gamified" apps, they are often employed en masse. Prior research offers little guidance about how individuals with different dispositions may react-positively and negatively-to specific affordances. In this paper, we present a survey study investigating the relationships among individuals' personality traits and perceived preferences for various motivational affordances used in gamification. Our results show that extraverts tend to be motivated by Points, Levels, and Leaderboards; people with high levels of imagination/openness are less likely to be motivated by Avatars. Negative correlations were found between emotional stability (the inverse of neuroticism) and several motivational affordances, indicating a possible limitation of gamification as an approach for a large segment of the population. Our findings contribute to the HCI community, and in particular to designers of persuasive and gamified apps, by providing design suggestions for targeting specific audiences based on personality.

In this paper, we argue that atypical cognitive, perceptual and behavioral characteristics associated with serious mental illnesses should be taken into consideration when designing health technologies. While applications have been developed to assist in the treatment of these illnesses, the specific psychological characteristics of these disorders have rarely been considered extensively in the design process. Here, we explore how an understanding of the low-level characteristics of bipolar disorder, combined with a clinically-validated treatment and patients' lived experience, can inform mHealth design. We present a novel method -- in situ design -- to support ecologically valid design, and demonstrate its use through the co-development with 9 individuals with bipolar disorder of MoodRhythm, a mobile application designed to track and stabilize daily routines. We provide evidence that mHealth design elements tailored to the characteristics and needs of individuals with bipolar disorder can result in engaging interactions.

Visual approaches for conducting research during the design process often give voice to people and ideas that might otherwise remain obscured. Recent and increasing interest in visual research techniques has coincided with technological advances such as camera phones and visually oriented mobile applications. As a result of this close association between digital technologies and image-based research techniques, there are multiple opportunities and challenges within human–computer interaction (HCI) design practice to employ these strategies to improve user experiences. This article provides an overview of current visual approaches to research highlighting the role technology has played in facilitating and inspiring these techniques. A series of case studies are presented that provide a basis for understanding a breadth of visual approaches in HCI design practices as well as serve as a point of entry to a critical and reflective discussion about the use of these approaches in different circumstances. Based on these reflections, three value statements are offered as a means to encourage the use of these visual approaches more broadly and critically in HCI design studies.

We present an alternative approach to the design of personal informatics systems: instead of motivating people to examine their own behaviors, this approach promotes awareness of and reflection on the infrastructures behind personal informatics and the modes of engagement that they promote. Specifically, this paper presents an interface that displays personal web browsing data. The interface aims to reveal underlying infrastructure using several methods: drawing attention to the scope of mined data by displaying deliberately selected sensitive data, using purposeful malfunction as a way to encourage reverse engineering, and challenging normative expectations around data mining by displaying information in unconventional ways. Qualitative results from a two-week deployment show that these strategies can raise people's awareness about data mining, promote efficacy and control over personal data, and inspire reflection on the goals and assumptions embedded in infrastructures for personal data analytics.

The growing use of social media means that an increasing amount of people's lives are visible online. We draw from Goffman's theatrical metaphor and Hogan's exhibition approach to explore how people manage their personal collection of social media data over time. We conducted a qualitative study of 13 participants to reveal their day-to-day decision-making about producing and curating digital traces on Facebook. Their goals and strategies showed that people experience the Facebook platform as consisting of three different functional regions: a performance region for managing recent data and impression management, an exhibition region for longer term presentation of self-image, and a personal region for archiving meaningful facets of life. Further, users' need for presenting and archiving data in these three regions is mediated by temporality. These findings trigger a discussion of how to design social media that support these dynamic and sometimes conflicting needs.

We report on an empirical study where we cut off email usage for five workdays for 13 information workers in an organization. We employed both quantitative measures such as computer log data and ethnographic methods to compare a baseline condition (normal email usage) with our experimental manipulation (email cutoff). Our results show that without email, people multitasked less and had a longer task focus, as measured by a lower frequency of shifting between windows and a longer duration of time spent working in each computer window. Further, we directly measured stress using wearable heart rate monitors and found that stress, as measured by heart rate variability, was lower without email. Interview data were consistent with our quantitative measures, as participants reported being able to focus more on their tasks. We discuss the implications for managing email better in organizations.

Workplace collaboration often requires interruptions, which can happen at inopportune times. Sharing availability information can reduce many of these untimely interruptions. However, designing a successful availability-sharing system requires finding the right balance to maximize the benefits and reduce costs for both the interrupter and interruptee. The main challenges for finding such balance lie in the acquisition of availability information from the interruptee and its delivery to the interrupter. In this demonstration, we show how common technical approaches in ubicomp can address some of the problems typically encountered in availability sharing. We present InterruptMe, a novel availability sharing system that uses sensor information to calculate multiple availability measures for each interruptee and that delivers this information in the periphery of the interrupter's attention by using a projected peripheral display and monitoring implicit inputs to the system.

Workplace collaboration often requires interruptions, which can happen at inopportune times. Designing a successful availability-sharing system requires finding the right balance to optimize the benefits and reduce costs for both the interrupter and interruptee. In this paper, we examine the design space of availability-sharing systems and identify six relevant design dimensions: abstraction, presentation, information delivery, symmetry, obtrusiveness and temporal gradient. We describe these dimensions in terms of the tensions between interrupters and interruptees revealed in previous studies of workplace collaboration and deployments of awareness systems. As a demonstration of the utility of our design space, we introduce InterruptMe, a novel availability-sharing system that represents a previously unexplored point in the design space and that balances the tensions between interrupters and interruptees. InterruptMe differs from previous systems in that it displays availability information only when needed by monitoring implicit inputs from the system's users, implements a traceable asymmetry structure, and introduces the notion of per-communications channel availability.

Hierarchical file systems and file browsers offer powerful capabilities for managing and organizing folders and files. Yet they lack robust tools for annotating and documenting these files-individually or collectively-with descriptive text. In contrast, Web pages and wikis make it easy to create rich and meaningful narratives around digital artifacts, allowing files to be embedded within explanatory text and images. Unfortunately, considerable effort is required to manage files stored on Web servers and to ensure that the published content remains up-to-date. In this note, we describe WikiFolders, a hybrid system for annotating file folders that draws upon the strengths of both the hierarchical file system and wikis.

Activity-based computing represents an alternative to the dominant application- and document-centric model at the foundation of most mainstream desktop computing interfaces. In this paper, we present in-depth results from an in situ, longitudinal study of an activity-based computing system, Giornata. We detail the ways that the specific features of this system influenced the everyday work experiences of a small cohort of knowledge workers. Our analysis provides contributions at several levels of granularity-we provide concrete design recommendations based on participants' reactions to the particular features of the Giornata system and a discussion about how our findings can provide insight about the broader understanding of knowledge work and activity within HCI.

This paper presents research analyzing the role of computational technology in the domain of nonprofit fundraising. Nonprofits are a cornerstone of many societies and are especially prominent in the United States, where $295 billion, or slightly more than 2% of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product (i.e. total national revenue), was directed toward charitable causes in 2006. Nonprofits afford many worthwhile endeavors, including crisis relief, basic services to those in need, public education and the arts, and preservation of the natural environment. In this paper, we identify six roles that computational technology plays in support of nonprofit fundraising and present two models characterizing technology use in this domain: (1) a cycle of technology-assisted fundraising and (2) a model of relationships among stakeholders in technology-assisted fundraising. Finally, we identify challenges and research opportunities for collaborative computing in the unique and exciting nonprofit fundraising domain.

In any collaborative system, there are both symmetries and asymmetries present in the design of the technology and in the ways that technology is appropriated. Yet media space research tends to focus more on supporting and fostering the symmetries than the asymmetries. Throughout more than 20 years of media space research, the pursuit of increased symmetry, whether achieved through technical or social means, has been a recurrent theme. The research literature on the use of contemporary awareness systems, in contrast, displays little if any of this emphasis on symmetrical use; indeed, this body of research occasionally highlights the perceived value of asymmetry. In this paper, we unpack the different forms of asymmetry present in both media spaces and contemporary awareness systems. We argue that just as asymmetry has been demonstrated to have value in contemporary awareness systems, so might asymmetry have value in media spaces and in other CSCW systems, more generally. To illustrate, we present a media space that emphasizes and embodies multiple forms of asymmetry and does so in response to the needs of a particular work context.

The venerable desktop metaphor is beginning to show signs of strain in supporting modern knowledge work. In this paper, we examine how the desktop metaphor can be reframed, shifting the focus away from a low-level (and increasingly obsolete) focus on documents and applications to an interface based upon the creation of and interaction with manually declared, semantically meaningful activities. We begin by unpacking some of the foundational assumptions of desktop interface design, describe an activity-based model for organizing the desktop interface based on theories of cognition and observations of realworld practice, and identify a series of high-level system requirements for interfaces that use activity as their primary organizing principle. Based on these requirements, we present the novel interface design of the Giornata system, a prototype activity-based desktop interface, and share initial findings from a longitudinal deployment of the Giornata system in a real-world setting.

With the rapid growth of personal computer networks and the Internet, sharing files has become a central activity in computer use. The ways in which users control the what, how, and with whom of sharing are dictated by the tools they use for sharing; there are a wide range of sharing practices, and hence a wide range of tools to support these practices. In practice, users' requirements for certain sharing features may dictate their choice of tool, even though the other affordances available through that tool may not be an ideal match to the desired manner of sharing.In this paper, we explore users' current practices in file sharing and examine the tools used to share files. Based on our findings, we unpack the features and affordances of these tools into a set of dimensions along which sharing tools can be characterized. Then, we present the set of user interface features we have prototyped in an interface called a sharing palette, which provides a platform for exploration and experimentation with new modalities of sharing. We briefly present the tool as a whole and then focus on the individual features of the sharing palette that support reported styles of sharing.

Are the object manipulation techniques traditionally used in head-mounted displays (HMDs) applicable to augmented reality based projection systems? This paper examines the differences between HMD- and projector/camera-based AR interfaces in the light of a manipulation task involving documents and applications projected on common office surfaces such as tables, walls, cabinets, and floor. We report a Wizard of Oz study where subjects were first asked to create gesture/voice commands to move 2D objects on those surfaces and then exposed to gestures created by the authors. Among the options, subjects could select the object to be manipulated using voice command; touching, pointing, and grabbing gesture; or a virtual mouse. The results show a strong preference for a manipulation interface based on pointing gestures using small hand movements and involving minimal body movement. Direct touching of the object was also common when the object being manipulated was within the subjects' arm reach. Based on these results, we expect that the preferred interface resembles, in many ways, the egocentric model traditionally used in AR.

In this paper, we describe Kimura, an augmented office environment to support common multitasking practices. Previous systems, such as Rooms, limit users by constraining the interaction to the desktop monitor. In Kimura, we leverage interactive projected peripheral displays to support the perusal, manipulation and awareness of background activities. Furthermore, each activity is represented by a montage comprised of images from current and past interaction on the desktop. These montages help remind the user of past actions, and serve as a springboard for ambient context-aware reminders and notifications.