We examine the impact of deception in Mixed Reality (MR), focusing on how subversive elements affect user behavior and decision-making. In a controlled experiment with 250 participants playing a Whac-A-Mole MR game, we introduced three types of deception attacks: (1) a Physiological Spoofing Attack intended to foster false beliefs about bodily state; (2) a Gaslighting Attack that evokes false interpretations about bodily state by inducing doubt; and (3) a Disinformation Attack that presents false information by mimicking game- and system-level notifications to influence decision-making. We measured the effects on game performance, cognitive load, and behavioral responses. Results reveal that Physiological Spoofing and Gaslighting Attacks led to behavioral adjustments, though these effects diminished over time. Alternatively, false information presented in the Disinformation Attack adversely influenced decision-making. Our findings highlight the vulnerability of MR users to deception attacks and emphasize the need for adaptive security measures to mitigate these risks.

The Steam Deck, developed by Valve, combines handheld gaming with desktop functionality, creating unique challenges for digital forensics due to its Linux-based SteamOS and its stripped symbol tables. This research addresses how to conduct reliable memory forensics on the Steam Deck. Employing the Linux Memory Extractor (LiME) and Volatility 3, we acquire and analyze volatile memory, a process complicated by Steam’s stripped symbol table that obscures forensic reconstruction of memory structures. Our approach reconstructs these symbols and adapts forensic tools to the Steam Deck’s architecture. Our results include the successful generation and validation of symbol tables and the patching of profiles to align with system configurations. During gameplay, we observed a significant increase in platform-related and game-related processes, highlighting the system’s dynamic operation while gaming. These findings contribute to improving forensic methodologies for similar Linux-based devices, enhancing our capability to extract valuable forensic data from modern gaming consoles.

Code to Cope is a STEAM curriculum for young adults designed to teach, develop, and encourage coping mechanisms while learning programming with JavaScript. COVID-19 restrictions, such as social distancing and remote learning, disrupted social development and identity formation in young adults, exacerbating mental health issues that remain unaddressed in existing STEAM curriculum. Young adults are vulnerable to psychological distress that adversely affects educational experiences and career path choices. The Code to Cope curriculum was adopted by the creative coding course at Louisiana State University from 2021 to 2022. We conducted interviews with four students in 2021 and empirical studies with 34 students in 2022 to evaluate the effects of the curriculum in terms of code, coping, and creativity. The results of the study show that the Code to Cope curriculum effectively teaches computational thinking, develops self-care practices, and engages and motivates students.

While nature can benefit people both mentally and physically, contemporary society has become increasingly disconnected from nature. To rebuild a stronger connection with nature in our everyday life, we introduce FloraWear, a do-it-yourself, wearable living interface, that enables people to easily and closely connect with plants. This pictorial introduces how knowledge is built and shared with others using hybrid craft and fabrication, illustrates the material experiments and design development for FloraWear, and discusses how it affects wearers. Then we summarize how FloraWear can help catalyze a shift in people's perspectives towards nature. By developing emotional ties to their wearable plants, FloraWear wearers begin to understand that both they and their plants are part of an ecosystem.

Game masters (GMs) are creative practitioners who plan and orchestrate tabletop role-playing games. Through an interview study, we investigate how eight expert game masters adapt everyday technologies and materials as creativity support tools (CSTs) for improvisational and collaborative play. We integrate theories of improvisational and distributed creativity with the human-artifact model, which provides an activity-theoretical vocabulary for analyzing the mediating relationships between specialist practitioners and their tools. We show how GMs prepare and deploy readymade artifacts: analog and digital CSTs that flexibly mediate recurring creative tasks in their practice, such as improvising narrative elements, facilitating smooth play, and creating aesthetic effects. We find that GMs demonstrate designerly thinking as they create, share, and refine repertoires of readymade artifacts. We argue that our theoretical approach can inform future studies of IT-mediated creativity, and that readymade artifacts can be an analytical and generative concept for the design of novel creativity support tools.

Live streaming sites such as Twitch offer new ways for remote audiences to engage with and affect gameplay. While research has considered how audiences interact with games, HCI lacks clear demarcations of the potential design spaces for audience participation. This paper introduces and validates a theme map of audience participation in game live streaming for student designers. This map is a lens that reveals relationships among themes and sub-themes of Agency, Pacing, and Community—to explore, reflect upon, describe, and make sense of emerging, complex design spaces. We are the first to articulate such a lens, and to provide a reflective tool to support future research and education. To create the map, we perform a thematic analysis of design process documents of a course on audience participation for Twitch, using this analysis to visually coordinate relationships between important themes. To help student designers analyze and reflect on existing experiences, we supplement the theme map with a set of mapping procedures. We validate the applicability of our map with a second set of student designers, who found the map useful as a comparative and reflective tool.

Our objective is to explore distributed forms of creativity that arise in play to help guide and foster supportive research, game design, and technology. This workshop seeks to bring together researchers, game designers, and others to examine theories of creativity and play, game design practices, methods for studying creativity in play, and creative play experiences. Participants will present work, video prototype, discuss topics, and contribute to outcomes.

Our observations of landscape architecture students revealed a new phenomenon-interstices. Their bimanual interactions with a pen and touch surface involved various sustained hand gestures, interleaved between their regular commands. Positioning of the non-preferred hand indicates anticipated actions, including: sustained hovering near the surface; pulled back but still floating above the surface; and resting in their laps. We ran a second study with 14 landscape architect students which confirmed our observations, and uncovered a new interstice i.e. stabilizing the preferred hand while handwriting. We conclude with directions for future research and challenges for designers and researchers.

Maps in video games have grown into complex interactive systems alongside video games themselves. What map systems have done and currently do have not been cataloged or evaluated. We trace the history of game map interfaces from their paper-based inspiration to their current smart phone-like appearance. Read-only map interfaces enable players to consume maps, which is sufficient for wayfinding. Game cartography interfaces enable players to persistently modify maps, expanding the range of activity to support planning and coordination. We employ thematic analysis on game cartography interfaces, contributing a near-exhaustive catalog of games featuring such interfaces, a set of properties to describe and design such interfaces, a collection of play activities that relate to cartography, and a framework to identify what properties promote the activities. We expect that designers will find the contributions enable them to promote desired play experiences through game map interface design.

We derive a theory of multiscale design through a study of a landscape architecture studio classroom. We find that processes of designing, to meet a site's situated needs, involve creating and connecting representations across levels, such as overview and detail. We introduce multiscale design theory, which works to understand how designers explore, juxtapose, and synthesize relationships across levels of scale. We identify three design strategies landscape architecture students use to work with scale: multiply, map, and shift perspective. We combine these strategies with prior literature, across fields, to initiate a theory of multiscale design.

We identify emerging phenomena of distributed liveness, involving new relationships among performers, audiences, and technology. Liveness is a recent, technology-based construct, which refers to experiencing an event in real-time with the possibility for shared social realities. Distributed liveness entails multiple forms of physical, spatial, and social co-presence between performers and audiences across physical and virtual spaces. We interviewed expert performers about how they experience liveness in physically co-present and distributed settings. Findings show that distributed performances and technology need to support flexible social co-presence and new methods for sensing subtle audience responses and conveying engagement abstractly.

Web curation involves choosing, organizing, and commenting on content. Popular web curation apps-- e.g., Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest-- provide linear feeds that show people the latest content, but provide little support for articulating relationships among content elements. The new medium of free-form web curation enables multimedia elements to be spontaneously gathered from the web, written about, sketched amidst, manipulated, and visually assembled in a continuous space. Through free-form web curation, content is collected, interpreted, and arranged, creating context. We conducted a field study of 1581 students in 6 courses, spanning diverse fields. We derive patterns of free-form curation through a visual grounded theory analysis of the resulting dataset of 4426 curations. From the observed range of invocations of the patterns in the performance of ideation tasks, we conclude that free-form is valuable as a new medium of web curation in how it supports creative visual thinking.

We introduce, LayerFish, a bimanual interaction technique for layering overlapping content in large 2D design spaces. Designers compose visual elements, often producing overlap and requiring layering in the z-dimension. A common approach in design tools is to provide a scene index, as an ordered list of layered elements. Scene indexes become difficult, in terms of physical effort and human cognition, to deal with when working with hundreds of elements. LayerFish renders an in-place scene index as a fisheye to reduce demands on effort and attention. Bimanual gestures support selection, scrolling, and manipulation. We evaluated layering task performance with LayerFish in comparison to a traditional scene index. Findings indicate that the fisheye reduces time to find an element and selection reduces layering time when elements do not heavily overlap.

We explore the contextual details afforded by wearable devices to support multi-user, direct-touch interaction on electronic whiteboards in a way that-unlike previous work-can be fully consistent with natural bimanual-asymmetric interaction as set forth by Guiard.

We investigate how presentation in a free-form medium stimulates free-form thinking and discussion in the classroom. Most classroom presentations utilize slideware (e.g. PowerPoint). Yet, slides add intrusive segregations that obstruct the flow of information. In contrast, in a free-form medium of presentation, content is not separated into rigid slide compartments. Instead, it is visually arranged and transformed in a continuous space.

Ideation, the process of generating new ideas, is central to design where the goal is to find novel solutions around a set of requirements. Designers engage in diagramming, creating external representations of ideas. Diagramming connects the body and creative cognitive processes, as the hands transform physical media to explore ideas. HCI researchers need to leverage body-based interaction to support creativity. My Ph.D. research develops a new body-based diagramming environment to stimulate design ideation.

Evaluating creativity support environments is challenging. Some approaches address people’s experiences of creativity. The present method measures creativity, across conditions, in the products that people make. This research introducesinformation-based ideation(IBI), a paradigm for investigating open-ended tasks and activities in which users develop new ideas. IBI tasks span imagining, planning, and reflecting on a weekend, vacation, outfit, makeover, paper, internship, thesis, design, campaign, crisis response, career, or invention. What products do people create through engagement in IBI?Curationof digital media incorporates conceptualization, finding and choosing information objects, annotation, and synthesis. Through engagement in IBI tasks, people create curation products. This article formulates a quantitative methodology for evaluating IBI support tools, building on prior creative cognition research in engineering design to derive a battery ofideation metrics of curation. Elemental ideation metricsevaluate creativity within curated found objects.Holistic ideation metricsevaluate how a curation puts elements together. IBI support environments are characterized by their underlying medium of curation. Curation media include lists, such as listicles, and grids, such as the boards of Pinterest. An in-depth case study investigatesinformation composition, an art-based medium representing a curation as a freeform visual semantic connected whole. We raise two creative cognition challenges for IBI. One challenge is overcoming fixation—for instance, when a person gets stuck in a counterproductive mental set. The other challenge is to bridge information visualization’ssynthesis gap, by providing support for connecting findings. To address the challenges, we developmixed-initiative information composition(MI2C), integrating human curation of information composition with automated agents of information retrieval and visualization. We hypothesize that MI2C generatesprovocative stimulithat help users overcome fixation to become more creative on IBI tasks. We hypothesize that MI2C’s integration of curation and visualization bridges the synthesis gap to help users become more creative. To investigate these hypotheses, we apply ideation metrics of curation to interpret results from experiments with 44 and 49 participants.

Reflection, interpretation, and curation play key roles in learning, creativity, and problem solving. Reflection means looking back and forward among building blocks constituting a space of ideas, contextualizing with processes including tasks, activities, and one's internal thinking and meditating, and deriving new understandings, known as interpretations. Curation, in the digital age, means searching, gathering, collecting, organizing, designing, reflecting on, and interpreting information.

A use case involving integrating results from search engines illustrates how the meta-metadata language facilitates interoperable metadata semantics. Formal semantics can be hard to obtain directly. For example, search engines may only present results through web pages; even if they do provide web services, they don't provide them according to a mutually interoperable standard.

Collecting, organizing, and thinking about diverse information resources is the keystone of meaningful digital information experiences, from research to education to leisure. Metadata semantics are crucial for organizing collections, yet their structural diversity exacerbates problems of obtaining and manipulating them, strewing end users and application developers amidst the shadows of a proverbial tower of Babel. We introduce meta-metadata, a language and software architecture addressing a metadata semantics lifecycle: (1) data structures for representation of metadata in programs; (2) metadata extraction from information resources; (3) semantic actions that connect metadata to collection representation applications; and (4) rules for presentation to users. The language enables power users to author metadata semantics wrappers that generalize template-based information sources. The architecture supports development of independent collection representation applications that reuse wrappers. The initial meta-metadata repository of information source wrappers includes Google, Flickr, Yahoo, IMDb, Wikipedia, and the ACM Portal. Case studies validate the approach.

As information environments grow in complexity, we yearn for simple interfaces that streamline human cognition and effort. Users need to perform complex operations on thousands of objects. Human attention and available screen real estate are constrained. We develop a new fluid interface component for the visualization and adjustment of values while authoring, the In-Context Slider, which reduces physical effort and demand on attention by using fluid mouse gestures and in-context interaction. We hypothesize that such an interface will make adjusting values easier for the user. We evaluated the In-Context Slider as an affordance for adjusting values of interest in text and images, compared with a more typical interface. Participants performed faster with the In-Context Slider. They found the new interface easier to use and more natural for expressing interest. We then integrated the In-Context Slider in the information composition platform, combinFormation. Participants experienced the In-Context Slider as easier to use while developing collections to answer open-ended information discovery questions. This research is relevant for many applications in which users provide ratings, such as recommender systems, as well as for others in which users' adjustment of values on concurrently displayed objects is integrated with extensive interactive functionality.

combinFormation is a mixed-initiative creativity support tool for searching, browsing, organizing, and integrating information. Images and text are connected to represent surrogates (enhanced bookmarks), optimizing the use of human cognitive facilities. Composition, an alternative to lists and spatial hypertext, is used to represent a collection of surrogates as a connected whole, using principles from art and design. This facilitates the creative process ofinformation discovery, in which humans develop new ideas while finding and collecting information. To provoke the user to think about the large space of potentially relevant information resources, a generative agent proactively engages in collecting information resources, forming image and text surrogates, and composing them visually. The agent develops the collection and its visual representation over time, enabling the user to see ideas and relationships. To keep the human in control, we develop interactive mechanisms for authoring the composition and directing the agent. In a field study in an interdisciplinary course on The Design Process, over a hundred students alternated using combinFormation and Google+Word to collect prior work on information discovery invention assignments. The students that used combinFormation's mixed-initiative composition of image and text surrogates performed better.

While sometimes the task that motivates searching, browsing, and collecting information resources is finding a particular fact, humans often engage in intellectual and creative tasks, such as comparison, understanding, and discovery. Information discovery tasks involve not only finding relevant information, but also seeing relationships among collected information resources, and developing new ideas. Prior studies of search have focused on time and accuracy, metrics of limited value for measuring creativity. We develop new experimental methods to evaluate the efficacy of representational systems for information discovery by measuring the emergence of new ideas. We also measure the variety of web sites that participants visit when engaging in a creative task, and gather experience report data. We compare the efficacy of the typical format for collections, the textual list with a new format, the composition of image and text surrogates. We conduct an experiment that establishes that representing collections with composition of image and text surrogates promotes emergence in information discovery.

combinFormation's mixed-initiative composition space enables system agents and humans to engage in processes of finding relevant information, and forming and authoring collections. Previously, the system was developed and utilized to support information discovery. The efficacy of the system for supporting creativity has been established in some contexts.

We used human movement as the basis for designing a collaborative aesthetic design environment. Our intention was to promote social interaction and creative expression. We employed off-the-shelf computer vision technology. Movement became the basis for the choreography of gestures, the development of gesture recognition, and the development of imagery and visualization. We discovered that the design of clear affordances is no less important in movement-based than in mouse-based systems. Through an integrated and iterative design process, we developed a new type of affordance, the choreographic button, which integrates choreography, gesture recognition, and visual feedback. Jumping, a quick movement, and crouching, a sustained gesture, were choreographed to form a vocabulary that is personally expressive, and which also facilitates automatic recognition.How can we evaluate socially motivated interactive systems? To create a context for evaluation, we held an integrated exhibition, party, and user study event. This mixing of events produced an engaging environment in which participants could choose to interact with each other, as well as with the design environment. We prepared a mouse-based version of the design environment, and compared how people experienced it with the movementbased system. Our study demonstrates that movement-based affordances promote social interaction.