While much has been written on the age-based digital divide, more understanding of the relative importance of factors affecting use of the internet is needed. This paper analyses nationally representative data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) to understand older adults’ frequency of using the internet and reasons for not using it more. We examine the extent to which health, lifestyle, and sociodemographic correlate with the pronounced age gradient in not using the internet. We find that the reasons why people in the 80+ cohort did not use the internet more are not qualitatively different from the reasons people aged 50–64 or 65–79 did not use it more, but do differ between rare and regular users. We also find that of the myriad factors that are potentially relevant, only cognitive ability, educational attainment, and employment status were robustly associated with the age gradient in internet use.

As people age, sleep often becomes lighter, more fragmented, and a source of increasing concern. Smart rings, like Oura, offer a discreet and comfortable means of supporting sleep tracking, yet it remains unclear how older adults engage with the sleep-related insights they provide. Our research investigates how older adults engage with wearable-derived physiological and behavioural sleep data, the barriers they encounter in understanding health metrics, and the ways these technologies influence self-perception and wellbeing practices. We report findings from a one-month diary study (n=20) and follow-up interviews (n=10) after around four months of ring use. Participants reflected on the meanings they attributed to app-based metrics, and whether such feedback felt useful, confusing, or intrusive, revealing misalignments with youthful defaults that negatively impacted engagement. We explore this in terms of "age friction" and discuss opportunities for more age-inclusive wearable technologies that promote meaningful engagement with personal health and wellbeing data.

The way users hold a smartphone depends on the interaction task, yet little is known about the fingers’ engagement with the device’s surfaces beyond the touchscreen. Such an understanding not only opens up opportunities for novel on- and off-screen interactions, but also the device’s possible physical affordances. We present a study (N=23) that examines the hands’ physical engagement with the smartphone beyond the touchscreen across nine mobile interactions. Grasps were annotated from photographs, and contact regions were captured using residual heat traces from grasping the device. Our findings show that fingers and palms adopt a variety of support roles and postures when engaging with the smartphone’s back and side edges. The hand-contact maps reveal distinct patterns, differing in contact frequency and placement. This work contributes an empirical characterisation of hands’ back and edge engagement, highlighting design opportunities for future smartphone usage extending beyond the touchscreen.

Abstract The focus on managing problems that can arise for older adults has meant that extant HCI and Ageing research has not given the concepts of “age”’ and “ageing” the explicit theoretical attention they deserve. Attending to this gap, we critically examine a ten-year corpus of CHI publications through the lens of an existing typology that we have further developed to analyse how age is understood, interpreted, and constructed in the field of HCI. Our resulting multidimensional typology of age in HCI elucidates the distinctive characteristics of older adults considered when designing with and for this user group, but also highlights the need for a more critical, reflexive, social constructivist approach to age in HCI. Applying this approach, we explore age as a multidimensional system of stratification to better understand the phenomenon of the age-based digital divide.

How can the user be made comfortable with selecting the system?BEGIN How can the user be introduced to the system?CORE How can the user's selfcare aim be facilitated?END How can the user be supported in finding mental closure?POST How can the user be supported in continued self-care?LEAVING DISENGAGE LAPSE

ExtendAI makes plan for action extends user's plan by embedding feedback makes sense of plan containing AI's feedback makes final decision RecommendAI makes sense of AI's suggestions makes suggestion for action makes final decision Figure 1: Illustrative comparison of the thought process when interacting with two 'types' of AI -RecommendAI and ExtendAI.

The uptake of digital technology by older adults and service-providers has been partly driven by the pandemic but more recently by the erosion of in-person services because of increasing austerity and a harsher global economic climate. Against the backdrop of the UK’s cost of living crisis, we examine technology used frequently within five older adults’ households. Through two rounds of interviews and participant diaries, we show benefits and struggles of participants’ costly technology use, reflecting on what ‘cost of living’ means when technology designed to simplify older peoples lives, encounters problems. For HCI practitioners, we provide evidence of how personal smart devices can be better tailored to help older adults support themselves both economically and practically, during the cost of living crisis. We propose avenues for future research and design that better support indirect costs and reflect on how personal devices can be made self-sustaining, integrated and repairable.

Remote patient monitoring can significantly enhance post-operative home recovery for cancer patients, yet its effectiveness is often hindered by low patient engagement. Reassurance has been identified as a key factor in improving engagement. Our study explored how cancer patients seek reassurance through a Patient Public Involvement workshop with former patients. This involved developing personas for participants to navigate reassurance scenarios and share their post-operative experiences. Based on this, we co-created a reassurance journey map to illustrate when reassurance is needed, the behaviours patients use to seek it, and how it can be effectively provided. Our findings highlight three key design principles: the limitations of digital technology in offering reassurance, the personalised nature of reassurance, and the need for holistic integration. These are intended to inform the design of reassurance-focused RPM systems that better support cancer patients during home recovery. Practical design recommendations are also provided for developers and clinicians.

Navigating emotional conflicts within relationships can be challenging. People often struggle to express their emotions during a conflict, which can lead to misunderstandings and unresolved feelings. To facilitate deeper emotional expression, we developed TogetherReflect, a multi-user Virtual Reality (VR) experience designed for couples. Partners first draw their emotions related to a shared conflict in VR, allowing for individual expression and self-reflection. They then invite each other into their drawings to discuss their feelings, before drawing together on a shared canvas to reaffirm their love and commitment. Throughout this process, TogetherReflect provides prompts and guidance, aiming to foster self-reflection and communication skills. We exploratory evaluated the experience with 10 couples (n=20). Our findings indicate that TogetherReflect deepens personal emotional insights, fosters mutual understanding, and strengthens relational bonds. We highlight the potential of guided VR experiences to transform conflict resolution in intimate relationships and offer design considerations for future development.

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and their caregivers face daily challenges which can adversely affect their well-being, especially regarding communication within their care ecosystems, comprising family, friends, educators, and therapists. To foster communication among children and their care ecosystem and support their well-being, we created REMEMO, a mobile app that was iteratively designed and evaluated by actively involving ADHD children and their caregivers. REMEMO supports both individual and collaborative use, offering tailored features for different user groups: children, parents, or therapists and educators. Its primary function is to enable users to record their experiences and emotions and choose whether to share these with other members of the care ecosystem. We deployed REMEMO in a multi-week field study with five groups encompassing ADHD children (total participants n=18). Our analysis showed that REMEMO can support emotional expression, regulation, reflection, transparent and affectionate communication, as well as therapeutic practices, addressing needs of both ADHD children and their caregivers. Our findings also highlight the critical role of mutual understanding regarding technology use and contextual challenges in shaping usage patterns. We discuss opportunities and challenges in designing technologies that cater to the varying needs of different stakeholders of ADHD children's care ecosystems and engage in critical reflection regarding evaluating technologies with vulnerable populations, such as families of ADHD children.

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.

Negative emotions such as sadness or anger are often seen as something to be avoided. However, recognising, processing and regulating challenging emotional experiences can facilitate personal growth and is essential for long-term well-being. To support people in regulating and reflecting on negative emotions, we designed MoodShaper — a VR experience where participants autonomously create a virtual environment combined with emotion regulation (ER) interventions. Our system included three different interventions designed based on interviews with psychotherapists. We evaluated MoodShaper in a mixed-method between-subject study with n = 60 participants. Participants experienced one of the three ER interventions, allowing them to manipulate visual representations of negative emotions through externalisation, seclusion, or appreciation. We found that MoodShaper significantly increased positive affect while decreasing difficulties in ER and negative affect. Our work demonstrates how VR can provide technology-mediated support to reflect on, engage with and manage negative emotions. We contribute insights for future VR systems which support ER for challenging situations.

Many technologies for ADHD children and their caregivers focus on symptom management rather than overall well-being, often without involving them as technology co-designers and co-users. To explore how to design systems that integrate into their home and routines, we contribute the iterative design of MoodGems, a situated, modular, and portable set of physical displays, that allows children to record and share their data with their families. We conducted an online formative evaluation (n = 22) with ADHD children, parents, therapists, and HCI experts. Our work demonstrates the potential of technologies affording both individual and joint tracking to allow children to navigate and reflect on their experiences and emotions, and support family communication and children’s autonomy. The evaluation also uncovered necessary refinements in the system’s design. We contribute design insights towards technologies that empower ADHD children and integrate into their homes, and discuss therapists’ role in technologies that address ADHD families’ lived experiences.

Adolescence is a period of growth and exploration, marked by influential relationships with peers and parents. These relationships are essential for teenagers’ well-being, highlighting the need to support their interpersonal interactions. Emotional expression is key in resolving conflicts that can frequently arise. This paper investigates the potential of TeenWorlds, a Virtual Reality (VR) application, to facilitate emotional expression and shared understanding among teenagers and their peers and parents. In our study, teenagers, accompanied by either a peer or a parent (total n=42), used TeenWorlds to visually represent their emotions during a shared conflict, discuss them, and collaborate on a joint VR drawing. Our findings indicate that TeenWorlds can foster communication, reflection, and strengthen interpersonal relationships. However, notable differences were observed in interactions with peers versus parents. We contribute insights into designing VR systems that support reflective experiences and meaningful family interactions, ultimately enhancing the well-being of adolescents, parents, and families.

Attending university is an important time for many young people's social lives. But changes are afoot with new innovative digital higher-education experiences being built, shifting students' social lives further online. However, it is unclear how a longer-term shift to a digital university ecosystem will impact students and their social relations and how current technologies could amplify their social experience. We report a focus group study investigating the impact of a primarily digital university experience on the social relationships of incoming undergraduates. In line with existing research, we demonstrate how technology-mediated communications can benefit some aspects of students' social relations and less so for others. Our novel contribution is evidence of students' remarkable adaptiveness when facing an online-only university experience. Crucially, our participants identified and utilised the nuances of different online platforms to start and maintain new relationships. This way, they preserved their ability to nurture social relationships, even when dealing with an unexpected learning environment. We provide design recommendations for future metaversities and discuss students' resilience in sustaining personal relationships that can inform online-centric university models.

Whether it is sleep, diet, or procrastination, changing behaviours can be challenging. Individuals could design and build their own personalised digital interventions to help them reach their goals, but little is known about this process. Building upon previous research we propose the Behaviour Change with Trigger-Action Programming (BC-TAP) model which describes how individuals could bridge the gap between their current and desired behaviour through the creation of 'Do-It-Yourself' (DIY) digital interventions. We conducted a two-day participatory workshop based on the BC-TAP model with 28 participants. Participants articulated plans to change a behaviour of their choice and represented these plans in mobile device automations. After using their interventions for up to three weeks, participants reflected on their experience. Our findings report opportunities and challenges at each stage of the process. While formulating a digital proxy for certain behaviours was challenging, both failures and successes facilitated participants' awareness of their behaviour, and their ability to change it.

Playing together is crucial to the unique and invaluable bond between grandparents and grandchildren. However, co-located interactions and play can be limited due to time, distance, or pandemic-related restrictions. To facilitate distributed play, we developed MagiBricks, a system comprised of 3D-printed smart toy bricks and baseplates that provide feedback regarding their placement. The familiarity and appeal of toy bricks to both older adults and children make them ideal for intergenerational play. We conducted a within-subjects study with six grandparent-grandchildren pairs. We compared the interactions and perceived connectedness of the pairs while playing over a distance with either i) MagiBricks or ii) identical regular toy bricks. We found that MagiBricks affected communication dynamics, role taking, nature of play, and perception of connectedness during playtime compared to regular bricks, and were unanimously preferred. We contribute design implications for future systems leveraging (smart) tangibles and fostering intergenerational connectedness.

Designing for children with ADHD has been of increasing interest to the HCI community. However, current approaches do not adequately involve all relevant stakeholders, and primarily focus on addressing symptoms, following a medical model of disability that is extrinsic to neurodivergent interests. To address this, we employed a multi-step, multi-stakeholder approach (N=31). First, we conducted 1) interviews with children with ADHD and their care ecosystem followed by 2) a co-design pilot with one child with ADHD and his therapists and an interview with a UX designer and an occupational therapist. We then employed 3) co-design sessions with neurotypical children and children with ADHD, and 4) a focus group with their therapists. We identified communication and reflection as key concepts for empowering and promoting the well-being of children with ADHD and their care ecosystem. We contribute design implications for future systems aiming to promote the overall well-being of this population.

Reflecting on personal challenges can be difficult. Without encouragement, the reflection process often remains superficial, thus inhibiting deeper understanding and learning from past experiences. To allow people to immerse themselves in and deeply reflect on past challenges, we developed SelVReflect, a VR experience which offers active voice-based guidance and a space to freely express oneself. SelVReflect was developed in an iterative design process (N=5) and evaluated in a user study with N=20 participants. We found that SelVReflect enabled participants to approach their challenge and its (emotional) components from different perspectives and to discover new relationships between these components. By making use of the spatial possibilities in VR, participants developed a better understanding of the situation and of themselves. We contribute empirical evidence of how a guided VR experience can support reflection. We discuss opportunities and design requirements for guided VR experiences that aim to foster deeper reflection.

With rapid advances in artificial intelligence and natural language processing, voice assistants are evolving into advanced digital personal assistants capable of complex tasks. As they become more proficient at understanding people’s behaviors, preferences, intentions, and surroundings, opportunities for proactive interactions emerge. However, despite their potential benefits, people still find certain proactive agent interactions inappropriate and invasive, such as correcting or nudging the user. This study investigates humor’s potential to enhance the desirability of proactive agent comments, given its stress-relieving and acceptance-promoting characteristics. We investigate how infusing humor into VA statements affects perceptions of appropriateness and desirability in proactive interventions. We designed storyboards showcasing voice assistants’ proactive actions in everyday situations and social contexts. Participants () assessed these scenarios in an online questionnaire across multiple criteria. Our results reveal that humor’s impact on proactive statement desirability is contingent on participants’ perceptions of voice assistants and their subjective judgment of the humor.

This paper presents a systematic review of HCI literature focusing on children with ADHD, the prevailing mental health diagnosis in children. Its aim is to (i) chart the state-of-the-art in this domain (e.g. methods used), (ii) identify the ways the HCI community has addressed the needs of children with ADHD (e.g. technologies deployed), and (iii) describe the involvement of the various stakeholders playing a role in their everyday experiences (i.e. their care ecosystem). Our findings show limited engagement of the care ecosystem in the design, development and user studies of current technologies, and shortcomings in designing for multiple ecosystem stakeholders, despite their crucial role. We also find that most HCI contributions are systems aiming to address ADHD-related symptoms. Based on our findings, we provide suggestions for further research and design considerations for future systems that empower and promote the well-being of children with ADHD, while considering their care ecosystem.

Immersive interactive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) have the potential to foster well-being. While VR applications have been successfully used to evoke positive emotions through the presetting of light, colour and scenery, the experiential potential of allowing users to independently create a virtual environment (VE) has not yet been sufficiently addressed. To that end, we explore how the autonomous design of a VE can affect emotional engagement and well-being. We present Mood Worlds – a VR application allowing users to visualise their emotions by self-creating a VE. In an exploratory evaluation (N=16), we found that Mood Worlds is an effective tool supporting emotional engagement. Additionally, we found that an autonomous creation process in VR increases positive emotions and well-being. Our work shows that VR can be an effective tool to visualise emotions, thereby increasing positive affect. We discuss opportunities and design requirements for VR as positive technology.

Prior research has shown how ‘content preview tools’ improve speed and accuracy of user relevance judgements across different information retrieval tasks. This paper describes a novel user interface tool, the Content Flow Bar, designed to allow users to quickly identify relevant fragments within informational videos to facilitate browsing, through a cognitively augmented form of navigation. It achieves this by providing semantic “snippets” that enable the user to rapidly scan through video content. The tool provides visually-appealing pop-ups that appear in a time series bar at the bottom of each video, allowing to see in advance and at a glance how topics evolve in the content. We conducted a user study to evaluate how the tool changes the users search experience in video retrieval, as well as how it supports exploration and information seeking. The user questionnaire revealed that participants found the Content Flow Bar helpful and enjoyable for finding relevant information in videos. The interaction logs of the user study, where participants interacted with the tool for completing two informational tasks, showed that it holds promise for enhancing discoverability of content both across and within videos. This discovered potential could leverage a new generation of navigation tools in search and information retrieval.

"Commentary: human-centred AI: the new zeitgeist." Human–Computer Interaction, 37(3), pp. 254–255

Voice assistants have become hugely popular in the home as domestic and entertainment devices. Recently, there has been a move towards developing them for work settings. For example, Alexa for Business and IBM Watson for Business were designed to improve productivity, by assisting with various tasks, such as scheduling meetings and taking minutes. However, this kind of assistance is largely limited to planning and managing user's work. How might they be developed to do more by way of empowering people at work? Our research is concerned with achieving this by developing an agent with the role of a facilitator that assists users during an ongoing task. Specifically, we were interested in whether the modality in which the agent interacts with users makes a difference: How does a voice versus screen-based agent interaction affect user behavior? We hypothesized that voice would be more immediate and emotive, resulting in more fluid conversations and interactions. Here, we describe a user study that compared the benefits of using voice versus screen-based interactions when interacting with a system incorporating an agent, involving pairs of participants doing an exploratory data analysis task that required them to make sense of a series of data visualizations. The findings from the study show marked differences between the two conditions, with voice resulting in more turn-taking in discussions, questions asked, more interactions with the system and a tendency towards more immediate, faster-paced discussions following agent prompts. We discuss the possible reasons for why talking and being prompted by a voice assistant may be preferable and more effective at mediating human-human conversations and we translate some of the key insights of this research into design implications.

People’s physical movement and body language implicitly convey what they think and feel, are doing or are about to do. In contrast, current smart speakers miss out on this richness of body language, primarily relying on voice commands only. We present QUBI, a dynamic smart speaker that leverages expressive physical motion – stretching, nodding, turning, shrugging, wiggling, pointing and leaning forwards/backwards – to convey cues about its underlying behaviour and activities. We conducted a qualitative Wizard of Oz lab study, in which 12 participants interacted with QUBI in four scripted scenarios. From our study, we distilled six themes: (1) mirroring and mimicking motions; (2) body language to supplement voice instructions; (3) anthropomorphism and personality; (4) audio can trump motion; (5) reaffirming uncertain interpretations to support mutual understanding; and (6) emotional reactions to QUBI’s behaviour. From this, we discuss design implications for future smart speakers.

In the domain of computing education for children, much work has been done to devise creative and engaging methods of teaching about programming. However, there are many other fundamental aspects of computing that have so far received relatively less attention. This work explores how the topics of number systems and data representation can be taught in a way that piques curiosity and captures learners’ imaginations. Specifically, we present the design of two interactive physical computing artefacts, which we collectively call DataMoves, that enable students, 12-14 years old, to explore number systems and data through embodied movement and dance. Our evaluation of DataMoves, used in tandem with other pedagogical methods, demonstrates that the form of embodied, exploration-based learning adopted has much potential for deepening students’ understandings of computing topics, as well as for shaping positive perceptions of topics that are traditionally considered boring and dull.

Tangible interfaces have much potential for engendering shared interaction and reflection, as well as for promoting playful experiences. How can their properties be capitalised on to enable students to reflect on their learning, both individually and together, throughout learning sessions? This Research through Design paper describes our development of EvalMe, a flexible, tangible tool aimed at being playful, enjoyable to use and enabling children to reflect on their learning, both in the moment and after a learning session has ended. We discuss the insights gained through the process of designing EvalMe, co-defining its functionality with two groups of collaborators and deploying it in two workshop settings. Through this process, we map key contextual considerations for the design of technologies for in situ evaluation of learning experiences. Finally, we discuss how tangible evaluation technologies deployed throughout a learning session, can positively contribute to students’ reflection about their learning.

Interactive technologies are getting closer to our bodies and permeate the infrastructure of our homes. While such technologies offer many benefits, they can also cause an initial feeling of unease in users. It is important for Human-Computer Interaction to manage first impressions and avoid designing technologies that appear creepy. To that end, we developed the Perceived Creepiness of Technology Scale (PCTS), which measures how creepy a technology appears to a user in an initial encounter with a new artefact. The scale was developed based on past work on creepiness and a set of ten focus groups conducted with users from diverse backgrounds. We followed a structured process of analytically developing and validating the scale. The PCTS is designed to enable designers and researchers to quickly compare interactive technologies and ensure that they do not design technologies that produce initial feelings of creepiness in users.

Imbuing robots with personality has been shown to be an effective design approach in HRI, promoting user trust and acceptance. We explore personality design in a non-anthropomorphic voice-assisted home robot. Our design approach developed three distinct robot personas: Butler, Buddy, and Sidekick, intended to differ in proactivity and emotional impact. Persona differences were signaled to users by a combination of humanoid (speech, intonation), and indirect cues (colors and movement). We use Big Five personality theory to evaluate perceived differences between personas in an exploratory Wizard of Oz study. Participants were largely able to recognize underlying personality traits expressed through these cue combinations in ways that were consistent with our design goals. The proactive Buddy persona was judged as more Extravert than the more passive Sidekick persona, and the Butler persona was perceived as more Conscientious and less Neurotic than either Buddy or Butler personas. Users also had clear preferences between different personas; they wanted robots that mimicked but accentuated their own personality. Results suggest that future designs might exploit abstract cues to signal personality traits.

Addressing societal problems is complex; little is known about which paths or approaches are successful. We discuss what is involved in knowing when and how and for whom change needs to occur, as well as the impact of doing so at scale-especially when novelty and academic contributions may be compromised. To this end, we present a 'scaling up' framework based on a societal project where we worked with multiple stakeholders to improve food waste recycling rates in a housing estate. We propose three main factors involved in scaling up: (i) 'the people,' through reimagining roles and relationships, (ii) 'the method,' requiring flexibility in design and research, and (iii) 'the impact,' informing new measures by handing over the evaluation. We reflect on the challenges, dilemmas, and successes encountered, as well as discuss the benefit of 'handing over' the evaluation process to gather scalable metrics based on economic modelling.

Learning through exploration is assumed to be a powerful way of introducing children to computer science concepts. However, it is uncertain how exploring physical computing toolkits can promote movement between conceptual knowledge and abstract reflection, and lead to critical thinking about technology. We investigated how children aged 9-11 years explored and reasoned about personal and environmental data sensors, using a playful exploration-based physical toolkit in their classroom. We report on the ways in which critical thinking about sensor accuracy and reliability developed through reflective dialogue and playful interaction, taking into account the support structures embedded in the classroom. Finally, we discuss strategies for designing exploration-based learning for classroom settings, to promote critical thinking about data sensing.

Since the introduction of the iconic Aware Home project [39] in 1999, the notion of “living laboratory” has been taken up and developed in HCI research. Many of the underpinning assumptions have evolved over the past two decades in various directions, while the same nomenclature is employed—inevitably in ambiguous ways. This contribution seeks to elicit an organized understanding of what we talk about and when we talk about living lab studies in HCI. This is accomplished through the methods of discourse analysis [66, 69], a combination of coding, hypothesis generation, and inferential statistics on the coded data. Analysing the discursive context within which the term living laboratory (or lab) appears in 152 SIGCHI and TOCHI articles, we extracted five divergent strands with overlapping but distinct conceptual frameworks, labeled as “Visited Places,” “Instrumented Places,” “Instrumented People,” “Lived-in Places,” and “Innovation Spaces.” In the first part of this article, we describe in detail the method and outcome of our analysis that draws out the five strands. Building on the results of the first part, in the second part of this article, each of the five types of living lab is discussed using some of the prototypical examples of that kind presented in the literature. Finally, we discuss the raison d’être and future position of the living lab as a method within HCI research and design and in relation to advances in sensing technologies and the emerging world of intelligent built environments (e.g., smart city and smart home).

Newly emerging urban IoT infrastructures are enabling novel ways of sensing how urban spaces are being used. However, the data produced by these systems are largely context-agnostic, making it difficult to discern what patterns and anomalies in the data mean. We propose a hybrid data approach that combines the quantitative data collected from an urban IoT sensing infrastructure with qualitative data contributed by people answering specific kinds of questions in situ. We developed a public installation, Roam-io, to entice and encourage the public to walk-up and answer questions to suggest what the data might represent and enrich it with subjective observations. The findings from an in the wild study on the island of Madeira showed that many passers-by stopped and interacted with Roam-io and attempted to make sense of the data and contribute in situ observations.

Overlaying a building with images from the past can be an engaging way to explore a historic site. However, little is known about what type of content functions well when using augmented reality (AR) in outdoor contexts. This research investigates how different types of AR content – such as text or image – can affect the flow experience as well as other user affective and behavioural responses. We ran an experimental study with 85 participants at a university campus, where three groups used different apps – AR app with overlaid textual information, AR app with overlaid both textual information and images and an app with audio guide – to explore the area's historic and cultural background. The results show that overlaying images in addition to the text was clearly the most successful way of attracting attention and providing stronger flow in comparison to the apps that overlaid only text or delivered audio. However, we also discovered that users occasionally interpreted the overlaid imagery to be cues for something else other than what they were designed to represent. Finally, we discuss how AR content can enlarge otherwise invisible details, depict historic elements and unveil interiors of buildings.

Buildings and urban spaces increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence and new forms of interactivity, raising a wide span of research questions about the future of human experiences with, and within, built environments. We call this emerging area Human-Building Interaction (HBI) and introduce it as an interdisciplinary domain of research interfacing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Architecture and Urban Design. HBI seeks to examine the involvement of HCI in studying and steering the evolution of built environments. Therefore, we need to ask foundational questions such as the following: what are the specific attributes of built environments that HCI researchers should take into account when shifting attention and scale from “artefacts” to “environments”? Are architecture and interaction design methods and processes compatible? Concretely, how can a team of interaction designers bring their tools to an architectural project, and collaborate with other stakeholders? Can and will architecture change the theory and practice of HCI? Furthermore, research in HBI should produce knowledge and practical guidelines by experimenting novel design instances that combine architecture and digital interaction. The primary aim of this article is to specify the mission, vision, and scope of research in HBI. As the introductory article to the TOCHI special issue, it also provides a summary of published manuscripts and describes their collective contribution to the development of this field.

Many public buildings are entered through reception areas, intended for visitors to sit and wait in to be met. A concern is how to make visitors feel welcome while in transit. Hospitals, medical centres and other healthcare organisations are a special case where the challenge is to enable patients and families feel less anxious when waiting. One approach has been to design for distraction – where displays, surfaces, and interactive installations are created to draw visitor's attention away from their immediate thoughts. However, little is known as to how people respond to such interventions. We present the findings of an ethnographic study that examined the social and psychological effects of using distraction as a design principle in a children's hospital reception area. We discuss the challenges of designing to distract, in relation to how it can be combined with other architectural and HCI ones, when developing new human–building interfaces.

Bats are often disliked and feared by people. How might we enable the general public to learn more about the true nature of these creatures, and even to like them? In this paper, we introduce PlayBat, a physical public display, which combines a multi-modal interface, a constrained narrative structure and real-time IoT environmentally sensed bat call data. The aim of our research is to investigate whether promoting curiosity and discovery through enabling people to explore real-life data, answer quiz-like questions and engage with a multi-modal interface, is effective at engaging people and confronting their fears. We report on the design process and implementation of PlayBat, and the findings from an in-the-wild study. We discuss how tapping into multiple senses can draw people in, evoke curiosity and even change their views.

Existing platforms for sharing locative digital content rely on the use of mobile phones for accessing the content. This can be a major deterrent to wider public access and also hinders immediacy and 'in the moment' discoverability. Building on previous work in situated public installations, we developed Pinsight, a novel platform for enabling end-users, such as local communities, to create and share digital content in-situ with public audiences through physical interactive devices. Pinsight is based on a set of design principles that focus on supporting both the expressiveness of content creators and the appeal to public audiences. This paper describes the design of the platform and how it supports sharing knowledge in ways different to conventional media. Through preliminary evaluations and two in-the-wild studies, we explore how such a situated technology can be used by different user groups (content designers, history communities, local residents) for sharing content with public audiences (visitors, pedestrians, residents) in different contexts.

With a growing call for an increased emphasis on computing in school curricula, there is a need to make computing accessible to a diversity of learners. One potential approach is to extend the use of physical toolkits, which have been found to encourage collaboration, sustained engagement and effective learning in classrooms in general. However, little is known as to whether and how these benefits can be leveraged in special needs schools, where learners have a spectrum of distinct cognitive and social needs. Here, we investigate how introducing a physical toolkit can support learning about computing concepts for special education needs (SEN) students in their classroom. By tracing how the students' interactions-both with the physical toolkit and with each other-unfolded over time, we demonstrate how the design of both the form factor and the learning tasks embedded in a physical toolkit contribute to collaboration, comprehension and engagement when learning in mixed SEN classrooms.

Citizen sensing is an approach that develops and uses lightweight technologies with local communities to collect, share and act upon data. In doing so it enables them to become more aware of how they can tackle local issues. We report here on the development and uptake of the 'City- Commons Framework for Citizen Sensing', a conceptual model that builds on Participatory Action Research with the aim of playing an integrating role: outlining the processes and mechanisms for ensuring sensing technologies are co-designed by citizens to address their concerns. At the heart of the framework is the idea of a city commons: a pool of community-managed resources. We discuss how the framework was used by communities in Bristol to measure and monitor the problem of damp housing.

Augmented Reality (AR) is coming of age and appearing in various smartphone apps. One emerging AR type uses the front-facing camera and overlays a user's face with digital features that transform the physical appearance, making the user look like someone else, such as a popstar or a historical character. However, little is known about how people react to such stepping into character and how convincing they perceive it to be. We developed an app with two Egyptian looks, MagicFace, which was situated both in an opera house and a museum. In the first setting, people were invited to use the app, while in the second setting they came across it on their own when visiting the exhibition. Our findings show marked differences in how people approach and experience the MagicFace in these different contexts. We discuss how realistic and compelling this kind of AR technology is, as well as its implications for educational and cultural settings.

After 20 years of research, it is unclear what role the tabletop should play in the home or workplace. Progress has been made towards hardware and software interfaces, connectivity with nearby devices, and understanding human behaviour on and around the table -- yet, in practice tabletops see limited use. This workshop seeks to explore the development and use of tabletops from historical, technical, and social perspectives. Workshop goals include synthesizing opinion and experience from new and established researchers on future directions of tabletop research, and an open discussion of questions such as to what applications are tabletops best suited? and how can tabletops be better integrated into larger workflows and digital ecosystems?

How can civic technology be designed to encourage more public engagement? What new methods of data collection and sharing can be used to engender a different relationship between citizens and the state? One approach has been to design physical systems that draw people in and which they can trust, leading them to give their views, opinions or other data. So far, they have been largely used to elicit feedback or votes for one or two questions about a given topic. Here, we describe a physical system, called Sens-Us, which was designed to ask a range of questions about personal and sensitive information, within the context of rethinking the UK Census. An in-the-wild study of its deployment in a city cultural center showed how a diversity of people approached, answered and compared the data that had been collected about themselves with others. We discuss the findings in relation to the pros and cons of using this kind of innovative technology when wanting to promote civic engagement or other forms of public engagement.

Virtual try-ons have recently emerged as a new form of Augmented Reality application. Using motion caption techniques, such apps show virtual elements like make-up or accessories superimposed over the real image of a person as if they were actually wearing them. However, there is as of yet little understanding about their value for providing a viable experience. We report on an in-situ study, observing how shoppers approach and respond to such a "Magic Mirror" in a store. Our findings show that after the initial surprise, the virtual try-on resulted in much exploration when shoppers looked at themselves on a display integrated in the make-up counter. Behavior tracking data from interactions with the mirror supported this. Moreover, survey data measured perceptions of augmentation as well as hedonic and utilitarian value of the app and suggested the augmented experience was perceived to be playful and credible while also acting as a strong driver for future behavior. We discuss opportunities and challenges that such technology brings for shopping and other domains.

Learning about computing technology has become an increasingly important part of the school curriculum but it remains unclear how best to teach it to children. Here, we report on an empirical study that investigated how the process of making affects how children of different ages learn about computing technology. In one condition, they had to first make an electronic cube before conducting other activities and in the other they were given a ready made one to use. The results of the study show that for younger children, the making significantly improved their performance in a post-lesson test, whereas the older children performed equally well in both conditions. We discuss possible reasons for this, in terms of differences in creative appropriation. We also saw much spontaneous collaboration between the children that suggests making can encourage a collaborative relationship between children of different ages.

Internet of things (IoT) devices and sensor kits have the potential to democratize the access, use, and appropriation of data. Despite the increased availability of low cost sensors, most of the produced data is "black box" in nature: users often do not know how to access or interpret data. We propose a "human-data design" approach in which end-users are given tools to create, share, and use data through tangible and physical visualizations. This paper introduces Physikit, a system designed to allow users to explore and engage with environmental data through physical ambient visualizations. We report on the design and implementation of Physikit, and present a two-week field study which showed that participants got an increased sense of the meaning of data, embellished and appropriated the basic visualizations to make them blend into their homes, and used the visualizations as a probe for community engagement and social behavior.

Eye contact is crucial to shared encounters in public spaces. However, most urban technologies that aim to foster social interaction' attention towards the device rather than to those with whom the encounter is shared. We present the design and evaluation of the Jokebox, a lightweight technology that requires two passers-by to coordinate actions to hear a joke. In three in the wild studies at different locations we found that our design supported micro-level coordination in a consistent manner: by encouraging people to make eye contact and by using audible jokes, users engaged in interactions that often led to further conversation and laughter. We describe how opportunities for macro-level coordination were key to the success of the installation, but varied by context. Finally, we present design implications for considering both the micro and macro levels of social coordination.

For digital content curation of historical artefacts, curators collaboratively collect, analyze and edit documents, images, and other digital resources in order to display and share new representations of that information to an audience. Despite their increasing reliance on digital documents and tools, current technologies provide little support for these specific collaborative content curation activities. We introduce CurationSpace -- a novel cross-device system to provide more expressive tools for curating and composing digital historical artefacts. Based on the concept of Instrumental Interaction, CurationSpace allows users to interact with digital curation artefacts on shared interactive surfaces using personal smartwatches as selectors for instruments or modifiers (applied to either the whole curation space, individual documents, or fragments). We introduce a range of novel interaction techniques that allow individuals or groups of curators to more easily create, navigate and share resources during content curation. We report insights from our user study about people's use of instruments and modifiers for curation activities.

Gathering opinions from young children is challenging and different methods have been explored. In this paper we investigated how tangible devices can be used to gather feedback from children in the context of a theater performance. We introduce SmallTalk, a tangible survey system designed for use within a theater space to capture what children, aged 4 to 9, thought of a live performance they had just seen. We describe how the system was designed to build on previous feedback methods that had been tried; while at the same time meeting the constraints of the challenging theater context. We present results from seven deployments of SmallTalk and based on these we briefly discuss its value as a method for evaluating the theater performance. We then look at how the results validated the system design and present several design implications that more generally relate to tangible feedback systems for children.

The deployment of technology interventions, such as public displays and mobile apps, in community settings has been found to engage people in sharing and comparing their opinions. Our research is concerned with how to extend this to community-wide participation by devising and deploying multiple voting devices and visualisations. We present an in-the-wild study where a number of shopkeepers along a street participated by placing a novel voting device in their shops to collect locals' opinions. Results were displayed outside the shops, on the pavement. This distributed set-up was found to promote public debate on local issues, particularly around the perceived divide between people on either end of the street. We outline our design process and describe the impact of distributing voting devices and situated visualisations in a local community. \

Adults with Type 1 Diabetes have choices regarding the technology they use to self-manage their chronic condition. They can use glucose meters, insulin pumps, smartphone apps, and other technologies to support their everyday care. However, little is known about how their social lives might influence what they adopt or how they use technologies. A multi-method study was conducted to examine contextual factors that influence their technology use. While individual differences play a large role in everyday use, social factors were also found to influence use. For example, people can hide their devices in uncertain social situations or show them off to achieve a purpose. We frame these social behaviours using Goffman's theatre metaphor of onstage and offstage behaviour, and discuss how this kind of analysis can inform the design of future mobile medical devices for self-management of chronic conditions.

Cross-device interaction between multiple mobile devices is a popular field of research in HCI. However, the appropriate design of this interaction is still an open question, with competing approaches such as spatially-aware vs. spatially-agnostic techniques. In this paper, we present the results of a two-phase user study that explores this design space: In phase 1, we elicited gestures for typical mobile cross-device tasks from 4 focus groups (N=17). The results show that 71% of the elicited gestures were spatially-aware and that participants strongly associated cross-device tasks with interacting and thinking in space. In phase 2, we implemented one spatially-agnostic and two spatially-aware techniques from phase 1 and compared them in a controlled experiment (N=12). The results indicate that spatially-aware techniques are preferred by users and can decrease mental demand, effort, and frustration, but only when they are designed with great care. We conclude with a summary of findings to inform the design of future cross-device interactions.

Many companies would like to redesign their workspaces to make them more pleasant and even fun places to work in. An assumption is it will result in social and economic benefits. However, it can be difficult to achieve because of cost, level of disruption and regulations. We present an alternative approach that provides an injection of playfulness into "drab" office buildings. A lightweight technology intervention was designed - Mood Squeezer - that asks people to reflect on their mood by squeezing a colored ball from a box set. The squeezes are mirrored back as an aggregate colorful visualization on a public floor display. An in-the-wild study showed how this intervention was successful at getting people to squeeze their mood, leading to a diversity of conversations throughout the building. We discuss how this lightweight approach to office augmentation can provide new opportunities for opening up a "closed" workplace.

Organizers regularly want to understand the experiences of event goers and typically use survey methods, with researchers and clipboards. However, gathering opinions in such ways is difficult to do without disrupting the event goers' experience. In place of clipboard surveys, we developed a quite different form of tangible questionnaire, called VoxBox, which uses physical interactions to transform feedback giving into a playful and engaging experience that fits much more with the event itself. Here we question if such a device can successfully draw a diverse representation of event attendees to voice relevant opinions during the event. We describe an observational study of VoxBox based on two real-world deployments, and present findings on (1) the experiences VoxBox provides to facilitators and users; and (2) its capabilities as a means for opinion gathering. We conclude by discussing lessons learned, design implications, and the wide potential for tangible questionnaires in other application areas.

Gathering public opinions, such as surveys, at events typically requires approaching people in situ, but this can disrupt the positive experience they are having and can result in very low response rates. As an alternative approach, we present the design and implementation of VoxBox, a tangible system for gathering opinions on a range of topics in situ at an event through playful and engaging interaction. We discuss the design principles we employed in the creation of VoxBox and show how they encouraged wider participation, by grouping similar questions, encouraging completion, gathering answers to open and closed questions, and connecting answers and results. We evaluate these principles through observations from an initial deployment and discuss how successfully these were implemented in the design of VoxBox.

HCI projects are increasingly evaluating technologies in the wild, which typically involves working with communities over extended periods, often with the goal of effecting sustainable change. However, there are few descriptions of projects that have been successful in the long-term. In this paper we investigate what factors are important for developing long lasting community ICT interventions. We do this by analysing a successful action research project and provide five recommendations for facilitating sustained community engagement. CrowdMemo aimed to preserve local heritage in a town in rural Argentina and the project was set up so that it could be continued by the community once researchers had left. Participants created videos about personal memories of the town and over 600 people attended the premiere where they were first screened. The impact has not just been short-term and there has been sustained engagement with the project by stakeholders in the town and wider region: the local school integrated digital storytelling into its curriculum; the approach has been adopted by two nearby towns; and the project has influenced regional government educational policy.

In this paper, we report on autoethnography as a method to access non-routine usage of mobile devices, such as during business trips, vacations, etc. Autoethnography, a self-study method with the researcher as participant, was employed for the evaluation of a wrist blood pressure monitor used by people with conditions such as hypertension. The findings from the study were surprising, especially with respect to the environmental and social impact on the use of the technology. Although the autoethnographic method can be disruptive for the researcher, it enables them to understand and empathize with the experiences mobile device users can face in difficult to access contexts. This method allows HCI researchers to better understand user experiences with mobile devices, including mobile medical technology, especially during non-routine times that can be difficult to study in-situ with traditional user studies.

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.

30 years ago, a common caricature of computing was of a frustrated user sat staring at a PC hands hovering over a keyboard and mouse. Nowadays, the picture is very different. The PC has been largely overtaken by the laptop, the smartphone and the tablet; more and more people are using them extensively and everywhere as they go about their working and everyday lives. Instead the caricature has become one of people increasingly living in their own digital bubbles - heads-down glued to a mobile device, pecking and swiping at digital content with one finger. How can designers and researchers break out of this app mindset to exploit the new generation of affordable multimodal technologies, in the form of physical computing, internet of things, and sensor toolkits, to begin creating more diverse heads-up, hands-on, arms-out user experiences? In my talk I will argue for a radical rethink of our relationship with future technologies. One that inspires us, through shared devices, tools and data, to be more creative, playful and thoughtful of each other and our surrounding environments.

There has been a lot of excitement recently about how new technologies can transform learning. MOOCs, the internet of education and flipped classrooms are the latest hotly debated ways of changing how students learn in the modern world. At the same time, a diversity of innovative learning apps has been developed for tabletops, tablets and phones, supporting new forms of learning -- mobile, collaborative and situated. New electronic toolkits and programming environments are also emerging intended to introduce new generations to coding and computation in creative and engaging ways -- that go way beyond Logo. Never before has there been so much opportunity and buzz to make learning accessible, immersive, interactive, exciting, provocative and enjoyable. To realize the true potential of these latest technological developments, however, requires designing interfaces and apps to not only match learner's needs but also to encourage collaboration, mindful engagement, conversational skills and the art of reflection.

The increasingly cross-generational use of personal technology portrays families each absorbed in individual devices. Tablets potentially support multi-user working but are currently used as personal devices primarily for consumption, or individual or web-based games. Could tablets support creative co-located groupwork in families and how does such creative work differ from the same task on paper? We designed and evaluated an app requiring individual and group co-creation in families. 262 family groups visiting a science fair played the collaborative drawing game on paper and iPads. Group creations were rated significantly more original and cohesive on iPads than paper. Detailed video analysis of seven family groups showed how tablets support embodiment and use of digital traces, and how the different media sustain individual and shared actions at different stages in the creative process. We sketch out implications for ownership and 'scrap computers': going beyond personally-owned devices and developing collaborative apps to support groupwork with tablets.

Calibration is a necessary step in many sensor-based ubicomp applications to prepare a system for operation. Particularly when dealing with sensors for movement-based interaction calibration is required to individualize the system to the person's body. However, calibration is often viewed as a tedious necessity of a purely technical nature. In this paper we argue that calibration can be used as a valuable and informative step for users molding a technology for their own use. We explain this through two case studies that use body sensing technologies to teach physical skills. Our studies show that calibration can be used by teachers and pupils to set goals. We argue that demystifying calibration and designing to expose the intentions of the technology and its functioning can be beneficial for users, allowing them to shape technology to be in tune with their bodies rather than changing their body to fit the technology.

UniPad is a face-to-face, digital simulation for use in classroom settings that runs on shared tablets and a wall display. The goal is to encourage students to talk, collaborate and make decisions together in real-time, by switching between working on shared 'small group' devices and a 'whole classroom' public display - instead of working by themselves using their own device. It is intended to improve peer discussion and teacher involvement by focusing and constraining shared attention at different stages of an activity. The domain for this study is finance management. The system was designed using an iterative, participatory design method with expert finance educators and then trialed using an in-the-wild study at a school. The findings show how the set-up helped in facilitating verbal participation in the classroom. We discuss how lightweight, multi-device shared technology systems, such as UniPad, can be designed and used for a range of classroom activities.

introduction Share on Introduction to the Special Issue of "The Turn to The Wild" Guest Editors: Andy Crabtree View Profile , Alan Chamberlain View Profile , Rebecca E. Grinter View Profile , Matt Jones View Profile , Tom Rodden View Profile , Yvonne Rogers View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 3Article No.: 13pp 1–4https://doi.org/10.1145/2491500.2491501Published:01 July 2013Publication History 80citation1,259DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations80Total Downloads1,259Last 12 Months98Last 6 weeks14 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Theories of embodiment focus on how practical engagement and the structure of the body shape perception, experience, and cognition. They typically reject a view of human cognition as grounded in abstract information processing. The concept of embodied interaction is increasingly used in the design, analysis, and evaluation of interactions with and around technology. However, many questions remain as to exactly what embodied interaction means and whether it can be considered a coherent program of research. The opportunities to support embodied interaction have expanded significantly in recent years with the development of a range of technologies designed to sense movements of the body and the continued development of ubiquitous computing infrastructures that can gather or represent contextual data. There has also been a surge of interest in embodiment in HCI.

We are starting to see a paradigm shift within the field of HCI. We are witnessing researchers leaving the safety and security of their controlled, lab-based environments and moving their research out into 'the wild'. Their studies are carrying out in-situ development and extended engagement, sampling experiences and working with communities in their homes and on the streets. This research has initially focused upon understanding the impacts that technological intervention has upon our day-to-day life and is leading us to explore the ways in which in-situ design, development and evaluation can be used to understand and explore these technological interventions. Is it the case that lab-based studies, taking people out of their natural environment and designing in the lab without long term user engagement are no longer appropriate to properly understand the impacts of technology in the real world?

We describe the insights and challenges offered by researcher participation in in-the-wild studies through the comparison of two prototype evaluations with varying levels of researcher participation. By reflecting on these studies we expose different facets of the researcher's role when interacting with participants in in-the-wild studies. We also demonstrate the value of researcher participation in contributing to the way a researcher understands participant responses: aiding rapport, promoting empathy and stimulating the researcher to reflect on their own assumptions.

There is much potential for supporting collaborative learning with interactive computer simulations in formal education and professional training. A number have been developed for single user and remote interaction. In contrast, our research is concerned with how such learning activities can be designed to fit into co-located large group settings, such as whole classrooms. This paper reports on the iterative design process and two in-the-wild evaluations of the 4Decades game, which was developed for a whole classroom of students to engage with a climate simulation. The system allows students to play and change the rules of the simulation, thereby enabling them to be actively engaged at different levels. The notion of Contributory Simulations is proposed as an instructional model that empowers groups to make informed, critical changes to the underlying scientific model. We discuss how large-group collaboration was supported through constraining an ecology of shared devices and public displays.

In this paper we describe findings from two studies aimed at understanding how health monitoring technology affects the parent-child relationship, examining emotional response and barriers to using this type of technology. We present suggestions for the design of health monitoring technology intended to enhance self-care in children without creating parent-child conflict. Our recommendations integrate the study findings, developmental stage specific concerns, and prior HCI research aimed at children's health.

A variety of computing technologies, in addition to the personal computer, are now commonly used in many settings. As networking infrastructures mature, it is increasingly feasible and affordable to consider closer integration and use of these heterogeneous devices in tandem. However, little is known about how best to design or evaluate such ‘device ecologies’; in particular, how best to combine devices to achieve a desired type of collaborative user experience. A central concern is how users switch their attention between devices, to utilize the various elements to best effect. We describe here the development of an ecology of devices for groups of students to use when engaged in collaborative inquiry-learning activities. This included a multi-touch tabletop, laptops, projections, video streams and telephone. In situ studies of students and tutors using it in three different settings showed how individuals and groups switched their foci between the multiple devices. We present our findings, using a novel method for analysing users’ transitions between foci, identifying patterns and emergent characteristics. We then discuss the importance of designing for transitions that enable groups to appropriately utilise an ecology of devices, using the concepts of seams, bridges, niches and focal character.

Multi-user interfaces are said to provide “natural” interaction in supporting collaboration, compared to individual and noncolocated technologies. We identify three mechanisms accounting for the success of such interfaces: high awareness of others' actions and intentions, high control over the interface, and high availability of background information . We challenge the idea that interaction over such interfaces is necessarily “natural” and argue that everyday interaction involves constraints on awareness, control, and availability. These constraints help people interact more smoothly. We draw from social developmental psychology to characterize the design of multi-user interfaces in terms of how constraints on these mechanisms can be best used to promote collaboration. We use this framework of mechanisms and constraints to explain the successes and failures of existing designs, then apply it to three case studies of design, and finally derive from them a set of questions to consider when designing and analysing multi-user interfaces for collaboration.

As computing increasingly deals with our lived experiences in complex social ecologies such as urban and public environments, designers are challenged with new methods and ways of appropriating computation and experience around public creativity. Public creativity deals with interactions in public interactive installations that are not task-based queries of information but social constructions of user generated and collaborative content. In this paper, we present an analytic framework to evaluate such interactions in public installations. We then present a study where we designed, installed and evaluated a user generated art installation through the lens of this framework.

Vibrotactile feedback offers much potential for facilitating and accelerating how people learn sensory-motor skills that typically take hundreds of hours to learn, such as learning to play a musical instrument, skiing or swimming. However, there is little evidence of this benefit materializing outside of research lab settings. We describe the findings of an in-the-wild study that explored how to integrate vibrotactile feedback into a real-world teaching setting. The focus of the study was on exploring how children of different ages, learning to play the violin, can use real-time vibrotactile feedback. Many of the findings were unexpected, showing how students and their teachers appropriated the technology in creative ways. We present some 'lessons learned' that are also applicable to other training settings, emphasizing the need to understand how vibrotactile feedback can switch between being foregrounded and backgrounded depending on the demands of the task, the teacher's role in making it work and when feedback is most relevant and useful. Finally, we discuss how vibrotactile feedback can provide a new language for talking about the skill being learned that may also play an instrumental role in enhancing learning.

A growing body of research has been exploring the use of control mechanisms to address the privacy concerns raised by location-tracking technology. We report on a qualitative study of two family groups who used a custom-built tracking application for an extended period of time. Akin to sociological breaching experiments, the study focuses on the interferences between location tracking and relationship management. We analyze the tensions that can arise between affordances of the technology and uses that the contracts between family members legitimize. We describe how, by fostering misperceptions and 'nudging' behaviors, location-tracking technology can generate anxieties and conflicts even in close relationships. We discuss their vulnerability to the overreaching effects of tracking, against which the use of mechanisms such as location-sharing preferences and feedback may not be socially viable.

Multi-touch tabletops have been much heralded as an innovative technology that can facilitate new ways of group working. However, there is little evidence of these materialising outside of research lab settings. We present the findings of a 5-week in-the-wild study examining how a shared planning application - designed to run on a walk-up-and-use tabletop - was used when placed in a tourist information centre. We describe how groups approached, congregated and interacted with it and the social interactions that took place - noting how they were quite different from research findings describing the ways groups work around a tabletop in lab settings. We discuss the implications of such situated group work for designing collaborative tabletop applications for use in public settings.

Interaction between in situ and distanced collaborators focused on the physical environment is an under-explored research area, where there is potential for novel mobile and indoor technologies to enhance activities. This paper describes research in progress to explore how new forms of collaborative learning in scientific fieldwork can be supported. We describe field trials of a prototype system designed to connect higher education students engaged in earth science fieldwork with peers based in a 'mission control' type environment. We discuss how analysis of these trials is leading us to identify new requirements to support effective collaboration between users based across contrasting locations, including issues of spatial coherence, deictic communication and reflection.

There are few conceptual tools available to analyse physical spaces in terms of their support for social interactions and their potential for technological augmentation. In this paper, we describe how we used Adam Kendon's characterisation of the F-formation system of spatial organisation as a conceptual lens to analyse the social interactions between visitors and staff in a tourist information centre. We describe how the physical structures in the space encouraged and discouraged particular kinds of interactions and discuss how F-formations might be used to think about augmenting physical spaces.

There are a number of mobile shopping aids and recommender systems available, but none can be easily used for a weekly shop at a local supermarket. We present a minimal, mobile and fully functional lambent display that clips onto any shopping trolley handle, intended to nudge people when choosing what to buy. It provides salient information about the food miles for various scanned food items represented by varying lengths of lit LEDs on the handle and a changing emoticon comparing the average miles of all the products in the trolley against a social norm. When evaluated in situ, the lambent handle display nudged people to choose products with fewer food miles than the items they selected using their ordinary shopping strategies. People also felt guilty when the average mileage of the contents of their entire shopping trolley was above the social norm. The findings are discussed in terms of how to provide different kinds of product information that people care about, using simple lambent displays.

An immersive theatre experience was designed to raise awareness and question perceptions of 'blindness', through enabling both sighted and blind members to experience a similar reality. A multimodal experience was created, comprising ambient sounds and narratives -- heard through headphones -- and an assortment of themed tactile objects, intended to be felt. In addition, audience members were each provided with a novel haptic device that was designed to enhance their discovery of a pitch-black space. An in the wild study of the cultural experience showed how blind and sighted audience members had different 'felt' experiences, but that neither was a lesser one. Furthermore, the haptic device was found to encourage enactive exploration and provide reassurance of the environment for both sighted and blind people, rather than acting simply as a navigation guide. We discuss the potential of using haptic feedback to create cultural experiences for both blind and sighted people; rethinking current utilitarian framing of it as assistive technology.

We describe the many challenges faced when designing, implementing and embedding large-scale installations in a physical space, such as a building. A case study is presented of a distributed ambient display system intended to inform, lure and influence people when moving through the building. We outline the wide range of technical, user, aesthetic and practical aspects that need to be addressed; pointing out how many unpredictable problems can surface when going 'big', 'physical' and 'out of the PC', We argue that a different set of 'non-user-centered' processes are required. Furthermore, we propose a new design implementation approach that includes aspects of iterative design, but with the new processes of bricolage and consultation added for progressing the design.

How can we best explore the range of users' reactions when developing future technologies that may be controversial, such as personal healthcare systems? Our approach -- ContraVision -- uses futuristic videos, or other narrative forms, that convey either negative or positive aspects of the proposed technology for the same scenarios. We conducted a user study to investigate what range of responses the different versions elicited. Our findings show that the use of two systematically comparable representations of the same technology can elicit a wider spectrum of reactions than a single representation can. We discuss why this is so and the value of obtaining breadth in user feedback for potentially controversial technologies.

Can ubiquitous technologies be designed to nudge people to change their behavior? If so, how? We describe an ambient installation that was intended to help people decide - and to encourage them to reflect - when confronted with a choice. In this particular case, it was whether to take the stairs or the elevator in their place of work. The rationale was to push people towards a desired behavior at the point of decision-making and to reflect upon theirs and others' aggregate behavior. We describe the ambient displays that were developed and the prototyping studies in which they were evaluated. The findings from an in-the-wild study are then presented. They reveal that even though people said they were not aware of changing their behavior, logged data of their actual behavior showed a significant change. We discuss these mixed findings in relation to whether ambient displays can influence at an unconscious or conscious level.

Applications running on multi-touch tabletops are beginning to be developed to enable children to collaborate on a variety of activities, from photo sharing to playing games. However, little is know as to how children work together on such interactive surfaces. We present a study that investigated groups of children's use of a multitouch tabletop for a shared-space design task, requiring reasoning and compromise. The OurSpace application was designed to allow children to arrange the desks in their classroom and allocate students to seats around those desks. A number of findings are reported, including a comparison of single versus multiple touch, equity of participation, and an analysis of how a child's tabletop position affects where he or she touches. A main finding was that children used all of the tabletop surface, but took more responsibility for the parts of the design closer to their relative position.

Tabletop and tangible interfaces are often described in terms of their support for shared access to digital resources. However, it is not always the case that collaborators want to share and help one another. In this paper we detail a video-analysis of a series of prototyping sessions with children who used both cardboard objects and an interactive tabletop surface. We show how the material qualities of the digital interface and physical objects affect the kinds of bodily strategies adopted by children to stop others from accessing them. We discuss how children fight for and maintain control of physical versus digital objects in terms of embodied interaction and what this means when designing collaborative applications for shareable interfaces.

Mobile privacy concerns are central to Ubicomp and yet remain poorly understood. We advocate a diversified approach, enabling the cross-interpretation of data from complementary methods. However, mobility imposes a number of limitations on the methods that can be effectively employed. We discuss how we addressed this problem in an empirical study of mobile social networking. We report on how, by combining a variation of experience sampling and contextual interviews, we have started focusing on a notion of context in relation to privacy, which is subjectively defined by emerging socio-cultural knowledge, functions, relations and rules. With reference to Gieryn's sociological work, we call this place, as opposed to a notion of context that is objectively defined by physical and factual elements, which we call space. We propose that the former better describes the context for mobile privacy.

No abstract available.

Musical harmony is considered to be one of the most abstract and technically difficult parts of music. It is generally taught formally via abstract, domain-specific concepts, principles, rules and heuristics. By contrast, when harmony is represented using an existing interactive desktop tool, Harmony Space, a new, parsimonious, but equivalently expressive, unified level of description emerges. This focuses not on abstract concepts, but on concrete locations, objects, areas and trajectories.

Computers designed for single use are often appropriated suboptimally when used by small colocated groups working together. Our research investigates whether shareable interfaces—that are designed for more than one user to interact with–can facilitate more equitable participation in colocated group settings compared with single user displays. We present a conceptual framework that characterizes Shared Information Spaces (SISs) in terms of how they constrain and invite participation using different entry points. An experiment was conducted that compared three different SISs: a physical-digital set-up (least constrained), a multitouch tabletop (medium), and a laptop display (most constrained). Statistical analyses showed there to be little difference in participation levels between the three conditions other than a predictable lack of equity of control over the interface in the laptop condition. However, detailed qualitative analyses revealed more equitable participation took place in the physical-digital condition in terms of verbal utterances over time. Those who spoke the least contributed most to the physical design task. The findings are discussed in relation to the conceptual framework and, more generally, in terms of how to select, design, and combine different display technologies to support collaborative activities.

Multi-touch surfaces are becoming increasingly popular. An assumed benefit is that they can facilitate collaborative interactions in co-located groups. In particular, being able to see another's physical actions can enhance awareness, which in turn can support fluid interaction and coordination. However, there is a paucity of empirical evidence or measures to support these claims. We present an analysis of different aspects of awareness in an empirical study that compared two kinds of input: multi-touch and multiple mice. For our analysis, a set of awareness indices was derived from the CSCW and HCI literatures, which measures both the presence and absence of awareness in co-located settings. Our findings indicate higher levels of awareness for the multi-touch condition accompanied by significantly more actions that interfere with each other. A subsequent qualitative analysis shows that the interactions in this condition were more fluid and that interference was quickly resolved. We suggest that it is more important that resources are available to negotiate interference rather than necessarily to attempt to prevent it.

Pervasive technologies, such as shared interactive surfaces and mobile devices, are beginning to be used to support a diversity of collaborative user experiences. Compared with fixed PC applications, however, they are more difficult to evaluate. Of importance, it requires understanding the context of use through capturing and analyzing different types of data (e.g., conversations, gestures, movements) and re‐representing them at different levels of abstraction. This can make the analysis complex and unwieldy, requiring teams of analysts to manage it. A new approach to managing the complexity of collaborative analysis is presented, where an integrated physical and conceptual space have been co-designed to allow design teams to readily share and transfer their interpretations of data through preserving the contextual information. A case study is described showing how a collaborative analysis approach enabled small groups of designers to work together to interpret and further analyze a variety of data.

A commentary of González‘s adaptation of Activity Theory for HCI is presented. It critiques his proposal for a new level of analysis that is called working spheres/engagements. While considered insightful it questions whether his new framework will be used by other researchers.

Abstract This study examines the differences between Scopus and Web of Science in the citation counting, citation ranking, and h ‐index of 22 top human‐computer interaction (HCI) researchers from EQUATOR—a large British Interdisciplinary Research Collaboration project. Results indicate that Scopus provides significantly more coverage of HCI literature than Web of Science, primarily due to coverage of relevant ACM and IEEE peer‐reviewed conference proceedings. No significant differences exist between the two databases if citations in journals only are compared. Although broader coverage of the literature does not significantly alter the relative citation ranking of individual researchers, Scopus helps distinguish between the researchers in a more nuanced fashion than Web of Science in both citation counting and h ‐index. Scopus also generates significantly different maps of citation networks of individual scholars than those generated by Web of Science. The study also presents a comparison of h ‐index scores based on Google Scholar with those based on the union of Scopus and Web of Science. The study concludes that Scopus can be used as a sole data source for citation‐based research and evaluation in HCI, especially when citations in conference proceedings are sought, and that researchers should manually calculate h scores instead of relying on system calculations.

In this paper, we describe a formative study to learn how one chronically ill population thinks about food, mentally organizes food, and interprets consumption-level icons. We found that many participants let their pride influence their choices, resulting in preferred interfaces that they could not accurately interpret. The results indicate that participants organized food in similar ways, had difficulty reading from their preferred consumption-level icons, and wanted to combine multiple interface designs when searching for food.

Gaining feedback from users early in the design of a complex, novel social system poses unique challenges. We report on our multi-session, in-context approach to get users to envision how they would use an early prototype in everyday life, combined with projections of how their friends would use it. The prototype is a novel social communication management tool and we required users develop a deep understanding of the complete system over time. Findings from data collected across four sessions show that using personalised task scenarios and giving users longer exposure to an early interactive prototype, combined with peer-to-peer discussion, enables participants to move beyond initial reactions to develop more reflective opinions. Participants were able to overcome first impressions and learning effects, develop deeper understanding of new conceptual models underpinning the system, integrate their understanding of piecemeal components and reflect on own use and use by others in deeper ways.

Ubiquitous and mobile technologies provide opportunities for designing novel learning experiences that move out of the classroom. Information can be presented and interacted with in a variety of ways while exploring a physical environment. A key issue this raises is when, where, what and how much? Our research is concerned with the design, delivery and interaction of digital information when learning about ecology outdoors. We present a framework of the different forms of digital augmentation and the different processes by which they can be accessed. Using the framework, we designed an outdoors learning experience, aimed at encouraging students to carry out contextualized scientific enquiry and to reflect on their interactions. Pairs of 11-12 year olds explored a woodland and were presented at certain times with different forms of digital augmentation. Our study showed that this kind of exploration promoted interpretation and reflection at a number of levels of abstraction.

We describe a user study of a large multi-user interactive surface deployed for an initial period within a real world setting. The surface was designed to enable the sharing and exchange of a wide variety of digital media. The setting for the study was the common room of a high school where students come together to mix, socialize, and collaborate throughout the day. We report on how the students use the new technology within their own established communal space. Findings show that the system was used extensively by the students in a variety of ways, including sharing of photos, video clips, and websites, and for facilitating social interaction. We discuss how the interactive shared surface was appropriated by the students and introduced into their everyday lives in ways that both mirrored and extended their existing practices within the communal space.

Large interactive displays are increasingly being placed in work and public settings. An assumption is that the shared surface they provide can facilitate collaboration among co-located groups. An exploratory study was carried out to investigate this claim, and, in particular, to examine the effects of the physical orientation of a display on group working. Two conditions were compared: vertical versus horizontal. A number of differences were found. In the horizontal condition group members switched more between roles, explored more ideas and had a greater awareness of what each other was doing. In the vertical condition groups found it more difficult to collaborate around the display. A follow-up study explored how participants, who had previous experience of using both displays, determined how to work together when provided with both kinds of display. The groups exhibited a more efficient and coordinated way of working but less collaboration in terms of the sharing and discussion of ideas.

We present a new way of conceptualising tangibles for learning. This scheme adopts Heidegger's analysis of the ways a user can treat a tool: either as 'ready-to-hand' or 'present-at-hand'. It also proposes two types of activity a learner can engage in when using a tangible: either exploratory or expressive activity. Finally, two types of models that a user can explore are proposed: theoretical and practical models.Examples from the literature are described in terms of this framework and an example is given from our own work of an attempt to use this conceptualisation in design.

This paper describes the design and deployment of a novel interactional workspace, intended to provide more effective support for face-to-face consultations between two parties. We focus on the initial consultations between customer and agent that take place during the development of complex products. Findings from an ethnographic study of the existing use of technological systems show the interaction during such consultations to be disjointed and not well supported. As an alternative approach, we developed a novel arrangement of multiple displays intended to promote shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration using a variety of interlinked representations and visualizations. The resulting interactional workspace was used by a travel company as part of a large international trade show attended by the general public. The many consultations that took place between agents and customers were quite different, proving to be more equitable, open, fluid and congenial.

In this paper we propose a novel way of supporting occasional meetings that take place in unfamiliar public places, which promotes lightweight, visible and fluid collaboration. Our central idea is that the sharing and exchange of information occurs across public surfaces that users can easily access and interact with. To this end, we designed and implemented Dynamo, a communal multi-user interactive surface. The surface supports the cooperative sharing and exchange of a wide range of media that can be brought to the surface by users that are remote from their familiar organizational settings.

Tangibles, in the form of physical artefacts that are electronically augmented and enhanced to trigger various digital events to happen, have the potential for providing innovative ways for children to play and learn, through novel forms of interacting and discovering. They offer, in addition, the scope for bringing playfulness back into learning. To this end, we designed an adventure game, where pairs of children have to discover as much as they can about a virtual imaginary creature called the Snark, through collaboratively interacting with a suite of tangibles. Underlying the design of the tangibles is a variety of transforms, which the children have to understand and reflect upon in order to make the Snark come alive and show itself in a variety of morphological and synaesthesic forms. The paper also reports on the findings of a study of the Snark game and discusses what it means to be engrossed in playful learning.

Dynamic interactive visualisations (DIVs) are intended to help coordination and collaboration, through augmenting existing forms of synchronous communication (i.e. phones, face to face, walkie-talkie). A central feature of a DIV is active user involvement: users are required to create, annotate, and change the information visualisation to represent the changes in the activity space they are concerned with. One benefit of doing so is to enable users to externalise and offload some of the cognitive effort involved. in problem-solving, by laying out information in ways that can help them derive a solution and know what to do next. In this paper we describe how we went about designing a DIV to support nomadic team working. We begin by describing our experimentation in designing a DIV. We then show how our computer-based DIV substantially, improved performance for a complex collaborative task, which involved much communication and cognition.

Article From Web press to Web pressure: multimedia representations and multimedia publishing Share on Authors: Victoria Bellotti Apple Research Labs, 1 Infinite Loop, MS: 301-4A, Cupertino, CA Apple Research Labs, 1 Infinite Loop, MS: 301-4A, Cupertino, CAView Profile , Yvonne Rogers Apple Research Labs & Sussex University, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK Apple Research Labs & Sussex University, Brighton BN1 9QH, UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '97: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systemsMarch 1997 Pages 279–286https://doi.org/10.1145/258549.258755Online:27 March 1997Publication History 39citation859DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations39Total Downloads859Last 12 Months13Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

The value of involving people as ‘users ’ or ‘participants’ in the design process is increasingly becoming a point of debate. In this paper we describe a new framework, called ‘informant design’, which advocates efficiency of input from different people: maximizing the value of contributions tlom various informants and design team members at different stages of the design process. To illustrate how this can be achieved we describe a project that uses children and teachers as informants at difTerent stages to help us design an interactive learning environment for teaching ecology.

Goals and content: This tutorial will give a detailed overview of the theoretical and methodoligical framework of distributed cognition. Detailed case studies will be presented to demonstrate how it can be applied to the design and implementation of CSCW systems. Participants will then put into practice the theory and methodology through hands-on group exercises using video material of actual and hypothetical work settings.

Compared with single user-computer interactions, evaluating multi-user-computer interactions is much more complex. We argue for multiplicity — of theory, method and perspective — in the evaluation of computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). This allows us to address both theoretical concerns and practical design issues, and to incorporate the expertise and experiences of both researchers and participants. We propose the PETRA framework, incorporating a theoretically-driven evaluators' perspective to investigate the collaborative activity, and a design-based, user-focused participants' perspective to evaluate the supporting tool. Our study investigated collaborative writing, both in a face-to-face context, and supported by a computer-based group editor. In our instantiation of the PETRA framework, we used distributed cognition and a form of breakdown analysis to investigate the development of shared understanding in the two different mediating settings; and devised a rapid prototyping session (inspired by participatory design) to elicit participant reactions to and redesigns of the tool interface. Our findings show that computer-supported shared understanding develops technologically, using social coordination as a repair mechanism; and that the collaborative tool must be particularly sensitive to issues of awareness, communication, focus and ownership.

Integrating CSCW systems to organisations is highly complex. This paper examines the co-evolution process involved in tailoring a CSCW system to fit in with the current organisational structure, whilst concurrently adapting the working practices to enable the system to support collaboration. A study is presented which analyses the various obstacles and inequities that ensue when a multi-user system is implemented in a company. To facilitate the management and resolution of the emergent problems, a preliminary conceptual framework is outlined. Finally, a case is presented for involving intermediaries in helping companies customise CSCW systems and adapt their work practices.

The implementation of networking technology in work settings offers numerous opportunities for improving the transmission of information and the sharing of resources within and between organizations.Its success in integrating distributed working activities, however, rests on how well the users of a network can coordinate their activities with respect to each other.This paper examines the communicative and interactive processes that take place when a typical breakdown occurs in a networked environment.A detailed analysis is presented which interprets the events that unfold in relation to the sociocognitive issues of shared understanding, the transmission of knowledge and distributed problem-solving.

Iconic interfacing is now widespread. Increasing aspects of the system functionality —including objects, options, operations, states and messages —are being represented at the interface in this pictorial form. Against this Zeitgeist, this paper sets out to discuss how useful icons really area and whether they live up to their expectations. A classification of the function and form of icons is outlined together with a proposal of the way in which a simple grammar of icon forms which maps onto the underlying system structure can be developed. Finally theoretical issues are discussed in the way in which information from icon-based displays is used when performing a task at the interface.