COVID-19 had substantial effects on the IoT community which designs systems for safety: the urge to face masks worn by everyone, the analysis of crowds to avoid the spread of the disease, and the sanitization of public environments has led to exceptional research acceleration and fast engineering of the related solutions. Now that the pandemic is losing power, some applications are becoming less important, while others are proving to be useful regardless of the criticality of COVID-19. The Safe Place project is a prime example of this situation (DATE23 MPP category: final stage). Safe Place is an Italian 3M euro regional industrial/academic project, financed by European funds, created to ensure a multidisciplinary choral reaction to COVID-19 in critical environments such as rest homes and public places. Safe Place consortium was able to understand what is no longer useful in this post-pandemic period, and what instead is potentially attractive for the market. For example, the detection of face masks has little importance, while sanitization does have much. This paper shares such analysis, which emerged through a co-design process of three public Safe Place project demonstrators, involving heterogeneous figures spanning from scientists to lawyers.

The possibility that common users are successfully recruited in cyberattacks represents a considerable vulnerability because it implies that citizens can legitimize cyberattacks instead of condemning them. We propose to adopt an argumentative approach to identify which premises allow such legitimization. To showcase this approach, we created four short narratives describing cyberattacks involving generic users and covering different motives for the attacks: profit, recreation, revenge, and ideology. A sample of 16 participants read the four narratives and was afterward interviewed to express their position on the attacks described. All interview transcripts were then analyzed with an argumentative approach, and 15 premises were found to account for the different positions taken. We describe the premises, their distribution across the four narratives, and discuss the implications of this approach for cybersecurity.

Data protection regulations require that website visitors provide their informed consent before their personal data are collected. However, privacy notices are often misunderstood. We claim that the context of the notice, i.e. the visitor’s action preceding their appearance, can affect its comprehension. In two studies with an ad hoc website (N = 132, 128), we either preserved the sequential connection between the notice and the action triggering it or broke it with a delay. We also manipulated the reference to the triggering action in the notice's title. The participants’ comprehension, perceived comprehension, and response were measured. In a third study (N = 91), we investigated how different contexts (i.e. generic vs. specific) affect the participants’ interpretation of the notice. Overall, the results suggest that the action preceding the notice affects the identification of its cause (studies 1, 2, and 3) and the interpretation of its content (study 3), whereas the explicit content of the notice does not. The acceptance of the notice does not seem to directly follow an improvement in comprehension, as would be foreseen by the transparency paradox. Considering the sequential context in which the notice appears seems then a good design practice to achieve genuine comprehension.

Computerized solutions in the domain of creativity and expressive performance increasingly provide art and artists with exciting new opportunities. However, the combination of automation and creativity also raises controversies and resistance in some user groups. This paper considers the case of software-generated visuals in live music performance and tries to make sense of the ambivalent response given by its intended users (i.e., DJs and VJs). We carried out seven face-to-face interviews, an online survey (N = 102) and 25 interviews at a distance to unravel DJs' and VJs' positions on automated visual software. Four core controversies were eventually identified, gravitating around the implications of using such software on DJs' and VJs' identities as artists and on their competitive advantage in their activity sector. The conclusions reconnect these findings with the larger issue of understanding the users' responses to automation.

While ordinary touchscreen-based interfaces on urban explorer applications draw much of a user's attention onto the screen, visual and audio-haptic augmented reality interfaces have emerged as the two main streams for enabling direct focus on the surroundings. However, neither interface alone satisfies users in the highly dynamic urban environment. This research investigates how the two complementary augmentation can coexist on one system and how people adapt to the situation by selecting the more suitable interface. A prototype was deployed in a field experiment in which participants explored points of interest in an urban environment with both interfaces. The engagement with the surroundings was compared with a touchscreen-based application. Most participants spontaneously switched between the two interfaces, which manifests the value of the availability of both interfaces on one system. The results point at the situated advantages of either interface and reveal the users' preferences when both interfaces are available.

Persuasive Technology (PT) is an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on the design and development of technologies aimed at changing users[#x02019] attitudes or behaviors through persuasi...

Interactive systems are increasingly used in a growing number of domains to encourage users to perform certain actions or take a certain position toward a given subject. This article offers a perspective on interactive persuasive systems that emphasizes theories and concepts that can guide their design and evaluation. The goal is not to champion a theoretical model over others or to compare the effectiveness of different persuasive strategies but rather to depict the current conceptual landscape in this field and highlight emerging concepts and positions that have recently appeared in it. The article includes a discussion of some representative, general, and domain-specific constructs that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of interactive persuasive systems.