Collocated collaboration remains a preferred mode of working together, yet current systems often depend on users to create and configure shared content. This places individual effort and attention on managing workspaces rather than engaging in collective sensemaking. We present a mixed-initiative interaction mechanism that automatically transforms ongoing conversation into manipulable shared materials, shifting externalisation from an explicit individual task to a by-product of discourse. We implement this mechanism in CollEagle, an interactive tabletop system that continuously generates candidate content from speech and enables users to curate, organise, and repurpose it for joint activity. A user study shows that automating material production reduces configuration work, supports group coordination, and foregrounds shared meaning-making. We contribute (1) a concrete implementation of a mixed-initiative interaction mechanism for collocated collaboration, and (2) design insights for systems that integrate implicit automation with explicit manipulation to better support joint work.

Office sensor systems often fail to present environmental data related to office well-being in ways that are accessible and comprehensible for non-expert users. To address this, we introduce Situated Data Sensemaking, a concept that enhances individuals’ ability to understand and use data by embedding it within their physical environment. Implemented through OfficeSense, a system that physicalizes environmental parameters—light levels, sound, air quality (CO2), and temperature—within office spaces, this concept was evaluated in a 4-week study (N=11) including a baseline week. OfficeSense influenced perceived data literacy and understanding of office well-being. Findings indicate that Situated Data Sensemaking supported participants in aligning their perceptions of environmental conditions with real-time data, influenced by spatial and temporal contexts, personal preferences, and collaborative interactions. This study demonstrates that embedding data in shared physical spaces can enhance users’ confidence in interpreting environmental data and foster collective awareness of workplace conditions.

Families often reflect on shared experiences, but few tools support this process through tangible, collaborative interaction. WePrism explores this space by introducing a constructive data physicalization toolkit designed for domestic self-tracking. Using modular tokens in various shapes, sizes, and colors, WePrism allows family members to represent and share aspects of their everyday lives through co-created sculptural forms. Emphasizing open-ended, screenless interaction, the system invites users to define their own symbolic mappings, encouraging creativity, interpretation, and ongoing dialogue. To evaluate its use, we conducted a five-day in-situ study with a family of three. Findings highlight the toolkit’s accessibility, ability to spark low-effort reflection, and potential to foster shared awareness. Participants appreciated its material presence but noted the need for clearer onboarding and more visible digital features. WePrism contributes to the growing field of tangible self-tracking by showing how physical artifacts can support inclusive, expressive, and reflective practices in home environments.

Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) that integrate digital information with physical interaction require specialized hardware and complex calibration, limiting their adoption in portable or mobile display systems. This paper introduces ArUcoTUI, a computer vision (CV) toolkit for prototyping tangible interactions on portable screens, leveraging standard cameras and the OpenCV library. ArUcoTUI uses ArUco fiducial markers to detect physical inputs. The software toolkit offers streamlined calibration, a signal processing pipeline, and a client application that translates tangible input into structured events for use in HCI applications. Using a conventional camera in a top-down setting with a flat-panel display, we demonstrate how this toolkit supports the development of interactive surface TUIs with advanced features, including 3D spatial interaction, multi-device interaction, and actuated tangibles within applications. We describe the software implementation, which utilizes accessible hardware to support the development of these tangible interactions. We provide the results of a preliminary evaluation with users, including design implications and suggestions for future research and development.

Modern workplaces increasingly rely on embedded sensors to monitor environmental conditions, yet these systems often operate opaquely—collecting data without user awareness, understanding, or agency. As a result, office workers lack the ability to interpret or act on data that impacts their well-being. To address this gap, we present SenseKit: a modular sensing system grounded in Human-Data Interaction principles of legibility, agency, and negotiability. SenseKit combines stationary modules that monitor environmental variables (air quality, light, noise) with wearable components that track personal well-being data (heart rate, activity, sleep). In a one-day field deployment, two office workers used SenseKit to explore their own environmental and physiological data in real time. The system supported situated reflection, encouraged environmental adjustments such as changing seats or opening windows, and prompted broader interest in how sensor feedback could guide healthier work routines. These findings illustrate how HDI-aligned, modular systems can support data-driven awareness and action.

Nearly 20 years ago, Gaver et al. introduced ambiguity as a design resource, proposing tactics to reflect everyday uncertainty into interactive systems. This approach is especially relevant for self-tracking wearables, which often obscure the inherent ambiguity of system design and tracked phenomena with seemingly clear, prescriptive data and insights. Although scholars recognize the importance of ambiguity, its practical application in the design process remains underexplored. To address this, we conducted a two-week workshop with 60 designers, examining the application of Gaver et al.'s tactics into 11 design concepts, and performed interviews with 16 participants. Our findings reveal eight relevant ambiguity tactics for self-tracking and offer insights into participants' experiences with designing using ambiguity. We discuss prescription and overlooked ambiguity as levers for the operationalization of ambiguity, the potential benefits and downsides of ambiguity tactics for users, future directions for HCI research and practice, and the study limitations.

Crowd management is crucial for large-scale events, requiring a 90% upfront planning effort with inter-disciplinarity and collaboration. However, existing tools often fall short of facilitating dynamic interactions between stakeholders during the planning process. This paper presents CrowdCollab, an interactive system consisting of a portable tabletop display platform with tangibles and a handheld display that adds a situated experience, fostering hands-on exploration from multiple perspectives. A user study was conducted with 16 participants to evaluate the usability and gather user feedback. The findings demonstrate valuable insights into how the designed system facilitates shared understanding and an engaging collaboration experience in crowd management.

Publicly displaying personal tracking data can promote healthier lifestyles, with most existing research focusing on digital visualizations. However, public physicalizations have been shown to attract more attention and foster greater engagement. Despite this, few studies in this area have utilized personal physical activity data as input or explored its impact on motivating data generators’ physical activity. To address this gap, we designed PlanetWalker, a system that visualizes users’ walking steps on their phone and shows the visualization publicly through a digital display, as well as medium- and large-scale public physicalizations as probes. The probes were deployed following the Wizard of Oz method in sequence during a six-week in-the-wild study. Through evaluations with users generating data and passersby, our findings show how public physicalizations can improve motivation, facilitate social interaction, and increase engagement. We conclude by discussing the design directions for supporting the public presentation of personal data through public physicalization to motivate physical activity and provide design trade-offs and suggestions on the physicality and scale of the medium.

Informal caregivers' engagement with patient data is becoming increasingly central to CSCW and HCI research on health management. Cardiac telerehabilitation (CTR) technologies generate lifestyle and well-being data that support patients and their families in recovery management, yet informal caregivers' roles in CTR remain underexplored. Recreational athletes in rehabilitation are an especially under-researched group, despite their and their support system's unique needs. Focusing on caregivers of recreational athletes, we conducted interviews with ten participants and used six visual scenarios of a dyadic CTR system to explore their perspectives on data and information co-participation. Caregivers reported that co-participation could strengthen dyadic coping and management but emphasized the need to balance important trade-offs. We provide design recommendations for dyadic CTR systems that balance care needs and preferences, promoting caregiver involvement in a supportive, non-supervisory role. We contribute to CSCW research by proposing a conceptual shift in technology-mediated rehabilitation care: positioning caregiver-inclusive CTR systems as negotiation tools that support boundary work and balance competing care values.

Sensors in offices mainly measure environmental data, missing qualitative insights into office workers’ perceptions. This opens the opportunity for active individual participation in data collection. To promote reflection on office well-being while overcoming experience sampling challenges in terms of privacy, notification, and display overload, and in-the-moment data collection, we developed Click-IO. Click-IO is a tangible, privacy-sensitive, mobile experience sampling tool that collects contextual information. We evaluated Click-IO for 20-days. The system enabled real-time reflections for office workers, promoting self-awareness of their environment and well-being. Its non-digital design ensured privacy-sensitive feedback collection, while its mobility facilitated in-the-moment feedback. Based on our findings, we identify design recommendations for the development of mobile experience sampling tools. Moreover, the integration of contextual data with environmental sensor data presented a more comprehensive understanding of individuals’ experiences. This research contributes to the development of experience sampling tools and sensor integration for understanding office well-being.

Data is often inaccessible for non-expert users, leading to a lack of data transparency and speculation in the understanding and interpretation of data, not providing personal value to individuals. The SensorBricks toolkit was evaluated during 5 workshops (N = 20) to learn how an IoT toolkit can support the development of data literacy. The SensorBricks toolkit introduced data to individuals in a fun, accessible and easy way, creating a low boundary for users to interact with data, sensors and output modalities. The toolkit helped individuals to reflect on the role of data in their environment. The collaborative aspect gave individuals the option to discuss the data and learn from each other’s experiences helping users to create a meaningful interpretation and shared understanding of sensor data. The combined digital and data physicalization data representation gives individuals both awareness and in-detail information, creating an understandable and informative way of presenting data.

Increasingly individuals use devices, diaries, or applications to track aspects of their lives. Visualizing diverse sets of data and exploring their relationships poses challenges when data is fragmented across different devices or sources. Constructive Physicalization offers an alternative approach by creating visualizations using tangible tokens, allowing for greater expressive freedom and a new visual mapping process. To address this, we developed DataChest. DataChest functions as a constructive data physicalization toolkit for self-tracking, enabling users to visualize and make sense of their data. Comprising of 1057 3D-printed components, including trays, tokens, and a guidebook. DataChest can be used to explore how individuals engage with their self-tracking data and gain insights into the effectiveness of different visualization approaches. Additionally, we introduce users to the toolkit by showcasing various data types and visualization expertise levels, reflecting different levels of toolkit complexity. Our insights are relevant for the development of constructive data physicalization toolkits.

Office well-being aims to explore and support a healthy, balanced and active work style in office environments. Recent work on tangible user interfaces has started to explore the role of physical, tangible interfaces as active interventions to explore how to tackle problems such as inactive work and lifestyles, and increasingly sedentary behaviours. We identify a fragmented research landscape on tangible Office well-being interventions, missing the relationship between interventions, data, design strategies, and outcomes, and behaviour change techniques. Based on the analysis of 40 papers, we identify 7 classifications in tangible Office well-being interventions and analyse the intervention based on their role and foundation in behaviour change. Based on the analysis, we present design considerations for the development of future tangible Office well-being design interventions and present an overview of the current field and future research into tangible Office well-being interventions to design for a healthier and active office environment.

Data physicalizations embody a fascinating intersection of design, technology, and data, where physical artifacts encode information through their geometry or material properties (Jansen et al. 201...

While data is the cornerstone of modern design strategies, design researchers frequently struggle when performing data work. This creates a need to design tools that enable design researchers to actively engage with data. However, this presupposes understanding how design researchers create meaning from data representations, as the way of visualizing the data, along with other factors, can significantly impact the extracted insights, increasing uncertainty about the quality of the outcome. As a response to this problem, we explore how design researchers make sense of data in a case study: making sense of paired subjective and objective sleep and stress data visualizations. By synthesizing our findings from two user studies, we construct a sensemaking model which highlights how uncertainty related to data qualities, visualization parameters, and the viewer's background affects the insight-generation process. Our findings have implications for the future development of tools and techniques for visual data sensemaking for designers.

The majority of errors in making processes can be tracked back to errors in dimensional specifications. While technical aspects of measurement, such as precision and speed have been extensively studied in metrology, the user aspects of measurement received significantly less attention. While little research exists that specifically addresses the user aspects of handling dimensions, various systems have been built that embed new interactive modalities, processes, and techniques which significantly impact how users deal with dimensions or conduct measurements. However, these features are mostly hidden in larger system contributions. To uncover and articulate these techniques, we conducted a holistic literature survey on measurement practices in crafting techniques and systems for rapid prototyping. Based on this survey, we contribute 10 measurement patterns, which describe reusable elements and solutions for common difficulties when dealing with dimensions throughout workflows for making physical artifacts.

Augmented Reality (AR) has shown great potential for supporting co-located collaboration. Yet, it is rarely articulated in the design rationales of AR systems that they promote a certain socio-spatial configuration of the users. Learning from proxemics, we argue that such configurations enable and constrain different co-located spatial behaviors with consequences for collaborative activities. We focus specifically on enabling different collaboration styles via the design of Handheld Collaborative Augmented Reality (HCAR) systems. Drawing upon notions of proxemics, we show how different HCAR designs enable different socio-spatial configurations. Through a design exploration, we demonstrate interaction techniques to expand on the notion of collaborative coupling styles by either deliberately designing for aligning with physical reality or going beyond. The main contributions are a proxemics-based conceptual lens and vocabulary for supporting interaction designers in being mindful of the proxemic consequences when developing handheld multi-user AR systems.

Sensing technology is increasingly used to collect data about the workplace to provide insights into building performance and work activities. While such systems provide meaningful insights, they are a ’black box’ in nature considering people as passive data subjects with no input into the sensing and data collection process. We propose a human-data interaction approach where human workers can opt-in using an ego-centric sensor platform – SensorBadge – that provides tools to collect and inspect personal office data. We describe a field exploration of Sensorbadge to understand the wearability, usability, and usefulness of ego-centric data collection. Our results show that office sensing systems should fit seamlessly in the office routine of individuals, without asking for extra effort or creating conflicts with work patterns. Data should be classified and presented against a frame of reference for comparison and visualized to create understandable and actionable representations with personal control of their office environment.

We are in the middle of a climate crisis. Never before has the impact of climate change been this visible, problematic, and timely. While most people have a basic awareness of the enormous potential impact of climate change, the reality is that only a few people have a detailed understanding of how their own (combined) personal activities – including food, transport, energy – impact the climate. In this pictorial, we explore the design process and principles of a data sculpture – Ecorbis – that is designed to help people reflect on how their day-to-day activities translate to climate impact. Ecorbis provides abstract and numerical weekly feedback on the overall environmental behavior of households and allows for in situ reflection and comparison. We conducted an initial 8-day field study with two families that highlighted that Ecorbis raised environmental awareness on climate impact and that the layered design of Ecorbis facilitated reflection.

Operators’ well-being is a key factor for the success of industrial production processes. Even though research has studied the well-being aspects of the industry, such as support and improvement of ergonomics, there is still a long way to go to achieve a sustainable and healthy work context for manufacturing industry. We believe the Human-Computer Interaction community can contribute by developing research on worker well-being in real-life settings. This workshop intends to offer a venue for HCI researchers that focus on worker well-being for the manufacturing industry and other industry domains.

Physicalizations represent data through their tangible and material properties. In contrast to screen-based visualizations, there is currently very limited understanding of how to label or annotate physicalizations to support people in interpreting the data encoded by the physicalization. Because of its spatiality, contextualization through labeling or annotation is crucial to communicate data across different orientations. In this paper, we study labeling approaches as part of the overall construction process of bar chart physicalizations. We designed a toolkit of physical tokens and paper data labels and asked 16 participants to construct and contextualize their own data physicalizations. We found that (i) the construction and contextualization of physicalizations is a highly intertwined process, (ii) data labels are integrated with physical constructs in the final design, and (iii) these are both influenced by orientation changes. We contribute with an understanding of the role of data labeling in the creation and contextualization of physicalizations.

This pictorial introduces TangibleTouch, a toolkit to design and build interactive tangible cubes using capacitive sensing. This toolkit enables designers to quickly prototype and explore tangible cubes with exchangeable capacitive panels that allows touch-based gestures and interactions that can be used for tangible input in VR, AR, or physical computing. We introduce a design space for TangibleTouch, and present the technical implementation, fabrication approaches, and software support for designers. We evaluate our toolkit by demonstrating its use and application for 3 different case studies: a media controller, a platform game, and a 3D model inspection tool. The contribution of our work is a novel toolkit method for constructing and fabricating a cube-based interactive tangible user interface.

The increasing availability of portable handheld mobile Augmented Reality technology is revolutionising the way digital information is embedded into the real world. As this data is embedded, it enables new forms of cross-device collaborative work. However, despite the widespread availability of handheld AR, little is known about the role that device configurations and size play on collaboration. This paper presents a study that examines how completing tasks using a simple mobile AR interface on different device sizes and configurations impacts key factors of collaboration such as collaboration strategy, behaviour, and efficacy. Our results show subtle differences between device size and configurations that have a direct influence on the way people approach tasks and interact with virtual models. We highlight key observations and strategies that people employ across different device sizes and configurations.

The standard definition for “physicalizations” is “a physical artifact whose geometry or material properties encode data” [47]. While this working definition provides the fundamental groundwork for conceptualizing physicalization, in practice many physicalization systems go beyond the scope of this definition as they consist of distributed physical and digital elements that involve complex interaction mechanisms. In this article, we examine how “physicalization” is part of a broader ecology—the “physecology”—with properties that go beyond the scope of the working definition. Through analyzing 60 representative physicalization papers, we derived six design dimensions of a physecology: (i) represented data type, (ii) way of information communication, (iii) interaction mechanisms, (iv) spatial input–output coupling, (v) physical setup, and (vi) audiences involved. Our contribution is the extension of the definition of physicalization to the broader concept of “physecology,” to provide conceptual clarity on the design of physicalizations for future work.

Situated visualization is an emerging concept within visualization, in which data is visualized in situ, where it is relevant to people. The concept has gained interest from multiple research communities, including visualization, human-computer interaction (HCI) and augmented reality. This has led to a range of explorations and applications of the concept, however, this early work has focused on the operational aspect of situatedness leading to inconsistent adoption of the concept and terminology. First, we contribute a literature survey in which we analyze 44 papers that explicitly use the term "situated visualization" to provide an overview of the research area, how it defines situated visualization, common application areas and technology used, as well as type of data and type of visualizations. Our survey shows that research on situated visualization has focused on technology-centric approaches that foreground a spatial understanding of situatedness. Secondly, we contribute five perspectives on situatedness (space, time, place, activity, and community) that together expand on the prevalent notion of situatedness in the corpus. We draw from six case studies and prior theoretical developments in HCI. Each perspective develops a generative way of looking at and working with situatedness in design and research. We outline future directions, including considering technology, material and aesthetics, leveraging the perspectives for design, and methods for stronger engagement with target audiences. We conclude with opportunities to consolidate situated visualization research.

Composite data physicalizations allow for the physical reconfiguration of data points, creating new opportunities for interaction and engagement. However, there is a lack of understanding of people’s strategies and behaviors when directly manipulating physical data objects. In this paper, we systematically characterize different reconfiguration strategies using six exemplar physicalizations. We asked 20 participants to reorganize these exemplars with two levels of restriction: changing a single data object versus changing multiple data objects. Our findings show that there were two main reconfiguration strategies used: changes in proximity and changes in atomic orientation. We further characterize these using concrete examples of participant actions in relation to the structure of the physicalizations. We contribute an overview of reconfiguration strategies, which informs the design of future manually reconfigurable and dynamic composite physicalizations.

While there is a strong relationship between climate change and human food consumption, it is challenging to understand the implications and impact from an individual perspective. The lack of a shared frame of reference, that allows people to compare their impact to others, limits awareness on this complex topic. To support group reflections and social comparison of the impact of people's food consumption on climate change, we designed Econundrum, a shared physical data sculpture that visualizes carbon emissions resulting from dietary choices of a small community. Our three-week field study demonstrates how Econundrum helped people (i) understand the climate impact of various food types, (ii) reflect on the environmental impact of their food choices; and (iii) discuss the relation between climate impact and food consumption with others. Our study shows how a shared physical data sculpture mediates a complex topic to a community by facilitating the social dynamics in context.

As physicalizations encode data in their physical 3D form, the orientation in which the user is viewing the physicalization may impact the way the information is perceived. However, this relation between user orientation and perception of physical properties is not well understood or studied. To investigate this relation, we conducted an experimental study with 20 participants who viewed 6 exemplars of physicalizations from 4 different perspectives. Our findings show that perception is directly influenced by user orientation as it affects (i) the number and type of clusters, (ii) anomalies and (iii) extreme values identified within a physicalization. Our results highlight the complexity and variability of the relation between user orientation and perception of physicalizations.

Mobile Augmented Reality (AR) technology is enabling new applications for different domains including architecture, education or medical work. As AR interfaces project digital data, information and models into the real world, it allows for new forms of collaborative work. However, despite the wide availability of AR applications, very little is known about how AR interfaces mediate and shape collaborative practices. This paper presents a study which examines how a mobile AR (M-AR) interface for inspecting and discovering AR models of varying complexity impacts co-located group practices. We contribute new insights into how current mobile AR interfaces impact co-located collaboration. Our results show that M-AR interfaces induce high mental load and frustration, cause a high number of context switches between devices and group discussion, and overall leads to a reduction in group interaction. We present design recommendations for future work focusing on collaborative AR interfaces.

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.

Designing interfaces or applications that move beyond the bounds of a single device screen enables new ways to engage with digital content. Research addressing the opportunities and challenges of interactions with multiple devices in concert is of continued focus in HCI research. To inform the future research agenda of this field, we contribute an analysis and taxonomy of a corpus of 510 papers in the cross-device computing domain. For both new and experienced researchers in the field we provide: an overview, historic trends and unified terminology of cross-device research; discussion of major and under-explored application areas; mapping of enabling technologies; synthesis of key interaction techniques spanning across multiple devices; and review of common evaluation strategies. We close with a discussion of open issues. Our taxonomy aims to create a unified terminology and common understanding for researchers in order to facilitate and stimulate future cross-device research.

The availability of mobile device ecologies enables new types of ad-hoc co-located decision-making and sensemaking practices in which people find, collect, discuss, and share information. However, little is known about what kind of device configurations are suitable for these types of tasks. This paper contributes new insights into how people use configurations of devices for one representative example task: collaborative co-located trip-planning. We present an empirical study that explores and compares three strategies to use multiple devices: no-overview, overview on own device, and a separate overview device. The results show that the overview facilitated decision- and sensemaking during a collaborative trip-planning task by aiding groups to iterate their itinerary, organize locations and timings efficiently, and discover new insights. Groups shared and discussed more opinions, resulting in more democratic decision-making. Groups provided with a separate overview device engaged more frequently and spent more time in closely-coupled collaboration.

Toolkit research plays an important role in the field of HCI, as it can heavily influence both the design and implementation of interactive systems. For publication, the HCI community typically expects toolkit research to include an evaluation component. The problem is that toolkit evaluation is challenging, as it is often unclear what 'evaluating' a toolkit means and what methods are appropriate. To address this problem, we analyzed 68 published toolkit papers. From our analysis, we provide an overview of, reflection on, and discussion of evaluation methods for toolkit contributions. We identify and discuss the value of four toolkit evaluation strategies, including the associated techniques that each employs. We offer a categorization of evaluation strategies for toolkit researchers, along with a discussion of the value, potential limitations, and trade-offs associated with each strategy.

To study and understand group collaborations involving multiple handheld devices and large interactive displays, researchers frequently analyse video recordings of interaction studies to interpret people's interactions with each other and/or devices. Advances in ubicomp technologies allow researchers to record spatial information through sensors in addition to video material. However, the volume of video data and high number of coding parameters involved in such an interaction analysis makes this a time-consuming and labour-intensive process. We designed EagleView, which provides analysts with real-time visualisations during playback of videos and an accompanying data-stream of tracked interactions. Real-time visualisations take into account key proxemic dimensions, such as distance and orientation. Overview visualisations show people's position and movement over longer periods of time. EagleView also allows the user to query people's interactions with an easy-to-use visual interface. Results are highlighted on the video player's timeline, enabling quick review of relevant instances. Our evaluation with expert users showed that EagleView is easy to learn and use, and the visualisations allow analysts to gain insights into collaborative activities.

This article proposes the concept of Collaborative Affordances to describe physical and digital properties (i.e., affordances) of an artifact, which affords coordination and collaboration in work. Collaborative Affordances build directly on Gibson (1977)’s affordance concept and extends the work by Sellen and Harper ( 2003 ) on the affordances of physical paper. Sellen and Harper describe how the physical properties of paper affords easy reading, navigation, mark-up, and writing, but focuses, we argue, mainly on individual use of paper and digital technology. As an extension to this, Collaborative Affordances focusses on the properties of physical and digital artifacts that affords collaborative activities. We apply the concept of Collaborative Affordances to the study of paper-based and electronic patient records in hospitals and detail how they afford collaboration through four types of Collaborative Affordances; being portable across patient wards and the entire hospital, by providing collocated access , by providing a shared overview of medical data, and by giving clinicians ways to maintain mutual awareness . We then discuss how the concept of Collaborative Affordances can be used in the design of new technology by providing a design study of a ‘Hybrid Patient Record’ (HyPR), which is designed to seamlessly blend and integrate paper-based with electronic patient records.

Real-time tracking of people's location, orientation and activities is increasingly important for designing novel ubiquitous computing applications. Top-view camera-based tracking avoids occlusion when tracking people while collaborating, but often requires complex tracking systems and advanced computer vision algorithms. To facilitate the prototyping of ubiquitous computing applications for interactive spaces, we developed EagleSense, a real-time human posture and activity recognition system with a single top-view depth-sensing camera. We contribute our novel algorithm and processing pipeline, including details for calculating silhouette-extremities features and applying gradient tree boosting classifiers for activity recognition optimized for top-view depth sensing. EagleSense provides easy access to the real-time tracking data and includes tools for facilitating the integration into custom applications. We report the results of a technical evaluation with 12 participants and demonstrate the capabilities of EagleSense with application case studies.

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?

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.

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.

In this workshop, we will review and discuss open issues, technical challenges and conceptual models for multi-device spatial or proxemic interaction. We aim to bring together researchers, students and practitioners working on technical infrastructures, studies and designs of spatial in-terfaces, or domain specific multi-device applications that use space as a unit of analysis. We focus specifically on analysing how such interfaces, tools and tracking technolo-gy can be deployed "in the wild". The workshop will facili-tate knowledge exchange about the current state of spatial and proxemic interactive systems, identify application do-mains and enabling technologies for cross-surface interac-tions in the wild, and establish a research community to develop effective strategies for successful design of cross-device interactions.

People increasingly use smartwatches in tandem with other devices such as smartphones, laptops or tablets. This allows for novel cross-device applications that use the watch as both input device and output display. However, despite the increasing availability of smartwatches, prototyping cross-device watch-centric applications remains a challenging task. Developers are limited in the applications they can explore as available toolkits provide only limited access to different types of input sensors for cross-device interactions. To address this problem, we introduce WatchConnect, a toolkit for rapidly prototyping cross-device applications and interaction techniques with smartwatches. The toolkit provides developers with (i) an extendable hardware platform that emulates a smartwatch, (ii) a UI framework that integrates with an existing UI builder, and (iii) a rich set of input and output events using a range of built-in sensor mappings. We demonstrate the versatility and design space of the toolkit with five interaction techniques and applications.

The medical record is a central artifact used to organize, communicate and coordinate information related to patient care. Despite recent deployments of electronic health records (EHR), paper medical records are still widely used because of the affordances of paper. Although a number of approaches explored the integration of paper and digital technology, there are still a wide range of open issues in the design of technologies that integrate digital and paper-based medical records. This paper studies the use of one such novel technology, called the Hybrid Patient Record (HyPR), that is designed to digitally augment a paper medical record. We report on two studies: a field study in which we describe the benefits and challenges of using a combination of electronic and paper-based medical records in a large university hospital and a deployment study in which we analyze how 8 clinicians used the HyPR in a medical simulation. Based on these empirical studies, this paper introduces and discusses the concept of collaborative affordances, which describes a set of properties of the medical record that foster collaborative collocated work.

Prior studies show that knowledge work is characterized by highly interlinked practices, including task, file and window management. However, existing personal information management tools primarily focus on a limited subset of knowledge work, forcing users to perform additional manual configuration work to integrate the different tools they use. In order to understand tool usage, we review literature on how users' activities are created and evolve over time as part of knowledge worker practices. From this we derive the activity life cycle, a conceptual framework describing the different states and transitions of an activity. The life cycle is used to inform the design of Laevo, a temporal activity-centric desktop interface for personal knowledge work. Laevo allows users to structure work within dedicated workspaces, managed on a timeline. Through a centralized notification system which doubles as a to-do list, incoming interruptions can be handled. Our field study indicates how highlighting the temporal nature of activities results in lightweight scalable activity management, while making users more aware about their ongoing and planned work.

Modern knowledge work consists of both individual and highly collaborative activities that are typically composed of a number of configuration, coordination and articulation processes. The desktop interface today, however, provides very little support for these processes and rather forces knowledge workers to adapt to the technology. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an activity-centric desktop system that (i) provides tools for ad hoc dynamic configuration of a desktop working context, (ii) supports both explicit and implicit articulation of ongoing work through a built-in collaboration manager and (iii) provides the means to coordinate and share working context with other users and devices. In this paper, we discuss the activity theory informed design of co-Activity Manager and report on a 14 day field deployment in a multi-disciplinary software development team. The study showed that the activity-centric workspace supports different individual and collaborative work configuration practices and that activity-centric collaboration is a two-phase process consisting of an activity sharing and per-activity coordination phase.

Distributed interaction is a computing paradigm in which the interaction with a computer system is distributed over multiple devices, users and locations. Designing and developing distributed interaction systems is intrinsically difficult as it requires the engineering of a stable infrastructure to support the actual system and user interface. As an approach to this re-engineering problem, we introduce NooSphere, an activity-centric infrastructure and programming framework that provides a set of fundamental distributed services that enables quick development and deployment of distributed interactive systems. In this paper, we describe the requirements, design and implementation of NooSphere and validate the infrastructure by implementing three canonical real deployable applications constructed on top of the NooSphere infrastructure.

Activity-Based Computing (ABC) has been proposed as an organisational structure for local desktop management and knowledge work. Knowledge work, however, typically occurs in partially overlapping subgroups and involves the use of multiple devices. We introduce co-Activity Manager, an ABC approach that (i) supports activity sharing for multiple collaborative contexts, (ii) includes collaborative tools into the activity abstraction and (iii) supports multiple devices by seamlessly integrated cloud support for documents and activity storage. Our 14 day field deployment in a multidisciplinary software development team showed that activity sharing is used as a starting point for long-term collaboration while integrated communication tools and cloud support are used extensively during the collaborative activities. The study also showed that activities are used in different ways ranging from project descriptions to to-do lists, thereby confirming that a document-driven activity roaming model seems to be a good match for collaborative knowledge work

Smart spaces research focuses on technology for multiple displays and devices for collocated participants. In most approaches, however, users have to cope with heterogeneous interfaces and information organization, as well as a lack of support for collaboration with mobile and remote users outside the smart space. In this paper, we present ReticularSpaces; a multi-display smart space system built on the principles of activity-based computing. The focus of ReticularSpaces is to support: (i) unified interaction with applications and documents through ReticularUI, a novel distributed user interfaces design; (ii) management of the complexity of tasks between users and displays; (iii) mobile users in a local, remote or 'nomadic' settings; and (iv) collaboration among local and remote users. We describe the motivation, design, and architecture of ReticularSpaces, and report from a preliminary feasibility study. The study shows that participants found ReticularSpaces useful and effective, but at the same time reveals new areas for research on smart environments.