In line with the shift toward dementia-friendly communities, HCI research is increasingly exploring holistic ways to support people living with dementia as active community members. However, less is known about how existing community networks influence technology design and effectiveness. This paper analyses Community-Based Participatory Design (CBPD) workshops conducted with individuals living with dementia, their spouses, and program coordinators through Wenger’s Communities of Practice Framework. We demonstrate how participants’ interactions created a community of practice through their: engagement in creating mutual meaning, alignment around a common purpose, and imagination in envisioning new possibilities for inclusion. Our findings highlight the agency of participants as they worked to create inclusive experiences for themselves and others. Our findings additionally demonstrated how community boundaries create systemic barriers that lead to non-participation. We argue Wenger’s framework offers a roadmap for designing technologies that foster person-to-person interdependence, helping to build more genuinely inclusive communities.

Temperature has strong potential to mediate emotion in a range of contexts; augmenting sensory experience and/or supporting emotion regulation. Hence, there is growing interest in leveraging thermal cues for affective technologies. At present, however, the design space for thermal technologies for emotion regulation remains underexplored and largely undefined. We construct a design space for thermal affective emotion regulation technologies, clarifying the rich, expressive nature of thermal cues as a design material. We develop this through a Research through Design (RtD) approach, grounded in an 18-month autoethnographic inquiry based on the first author’s emotion regulation practice. We contribute a structured design space for thermal affective interaction, linking experience and design implementation with designerly know-how. By discussing the creation of this design space we provide insights into the generative process of developing intermediate-level knowledge from autoethnographic study and design practice.

The use of a wide range of sensory modalities is increasingly central to technologies for learning, communication, and affective regulation. During the preschool years, sensory integration develops rapidly, shaping how children perceive and make sense of their environments. A key component of this process is cross-sensory correspondence: the systematic ways in which perceptions in different sensory modalities influence one another. Despite its relevance, little is known about cross-sensory correspondences in preschool-aged children (2-4 years). We present a study with 26 preschoolers examining smell-touch-emotion correspondences through playful tasks. We found significant correspondences both between sensory modalities and between sensory modalities and affective judgements. Further analysis revealed association strategies underpinning these mappings. We contribute empirical insights into cross-sensory correspondences in early childhood, design guidelines that align with how preschoolers relate sensory input, and a replicable method for probing cross-sensory cognition in this age group.

Metaphors improve communication between children and adults, which can be challenging due to differences in experiences. Cross-sensory metaphors convey qualities associated with one sense using terms from another, e.g. a “sharp smell'' and could thus improve generational communication by bridging differences in sensory cognition. We observed children (8-11yrs, n=65), young adults (18-24yrs, n=51) and older adults (60-85yrs, n=38) playing Sense-O-Nary, a variation of Pictionary where players construct and interpret cross-sensory metaphors, and analysed differences in metaphor type, degree of elaboration, and association strategies. We found that children relied on ``familiar experiences'' for metaphor construction, while adults used more diverse association strategies. Degree of elaboration was consistent across ages for tactile and visual stimuli but differed for olfactory stimuli. All groups used ``active'' metaphors most commonly, but children showed more use of ``implicit'', ``similes'', and ``personification''. We present designs that demonstrate how these characterisations could be leveraged to improve intergenerational communication.

Much work in HCI has investigated strategies for supporting autonomous self-regulation in social media use (SMU): helping users to control their time online and ensure it serves personally valued outcomes. However, results suggest that the effectiveness and acceptability of these strategies may vary based on individual needs. Recent work has attributed this variation to motivational factors, though we currently lack data to understand how these factors influence self-regulation, user experience and well-being. We draw on Self-Determination Theory to analyse autonomous and non-autonomous patterns of motivation in 521 users of social media. Using latent profile analysis, we identify 4 "motivational profiles"associated with significant differences in need satisfaction, affect, and compulsive engagement. Our results clarify distinct aspects of autonomy in SMU and identify opportunities to target and personalise design interventions; they suggest autonomous regulation can be associated with better experience and well-being, though not necessarily less time online.

Multifractality is a property of biological signals that is informative about the effectiveness of behavioural coordination. Since fatigue is known to undermine the ability to coordinate behavioural resources, we hypothesise that multifractal signatures may function as effective markers of fatigue. To further this line of research we conduct a study to investigate the association between fatigue and multifractal signatures during typing. We observe that multifractality in keystroke timings is significantly lower after exposure to a mentally fatiguing task, and that multifractal properties correlate with the degree of self-reported fatigue. We discuss the implications of this research for the development of unobtrusive, low cost fatigue monitoring and interventions, noting that multifractal analysis requires only the capture of input behaviour for the task, and that multifractality has been observed in a range of task-directed behaviours, not only typing. This points to the potential to infer fatigue via existing commodity input hardware, in a range of tasks.

Thermal-affective experience is a growing topic in Human-Computer Interaction. However, research linking thermal and affective experience in technology use has not moved beyond attempts to establish broad, sweeping associations, such as between warmth and positive affect. One of the obstacles to progression is the need for frameworks and vocabularies that describe and conceptualise the richness of thermal perception and affective experience. To help conceptualise associations between thermal perception and affective experience we turn to Cí poetry, a form of classical Chinese literature rich with evocative descriptions of embodied, environmentally situated, first-person experience. We conducted a lexical analysis to identify thermal-affective associations, and propose a design framework addressing thermal design. We demonstrate the value of this framework via analysis of existing thermal design exemplars.

Human agency and autonomy have always been fundamental concepts in HCI. New developments, including ubiquitous AI and the growing integration of technologies into our lives, make these issues ever pressing, as technologies increase their ability to influence our behaviours and values. However, in HCI understandings of autonomy and agency remain ambiguous. Both concepts are used to describe a wide range of phenomena pertaining to sense-of-control, material independence, and identity. It is unclear to what degree these understandings are compatible, and how they support the development of research programs and practical interventions. We address this by reviewing 30 years of HCI research on autonomy and agency to identify current understandings, open issues, and future directions. From this analysis, we identify ethical issues, and outline key themes to guide future work. We also articulate avenues for advancing clarity and specificity around these concepts, and for coordinating integrative work across different HCI communities.

Empowering people through technology is a core concern of HCI, yet little is known about how players experience empowerment or disempowerment through videogames. We surveyed 250 participants about their dis-/empowering videogame experiences, investigating why they felt dis-/empowered, and how these experiences related to core player experience constructs including emotion and basic needs satisfaction. While empowering experiences were often positive, and disempowering experiences often negative, we found meaningful exceptions to this, and a surprising complexity in player accounts. We capture this diversity in seven themes. These range from ”heroic victories” which follow long periods of failure, to positive experiences of disempowerment, which were appreciated for their narrative meaning. By articulating these complex experiences, and relating them to quantitative measures we provide a foundation for understanding of the role of dis-/empowerment in player experience, and highlight avenues for future work. Data and analyses are available at https://osf.io/zhtu8/

With the proliferation of shape-change research in affective computing, there is a need to deepen understandings of affective responses to shape-change display. Little research has focused on affective reactions to tactile experiences in shape-change, particularly in the absence of visual information. It is also rare to study response to the shape-change as it unfolds, isolated from a final shape-change outcome. We report on two studies on touch-affect associations, using the crossmodal “Bouba-Kiki” paradigm, to understand affective responses to shape-change as it unfolds. We investigate experiences with a shape-change gadget, as it moves between rounded (“Bouba”) and spiky (“Kiki”) forms. We capture affective responses via the circumplex model, and use a motion analysis approach to understand the certainty of these responses. We find that touch-affect associations are influenced by both the size and the frequency of the shape-change and may be modality-dependent, and that certainty in affective associations is influenced by association-consistency.

Information providers are faced with a critical challenge to process, retrieve and present information to their users in order to satisfy their complex information needs, because data has been increasing in an unprecedented manner, coming from diverse sources, and covering a variety of domains in heterogeneous formats. In this paper, we present Thomson Reuters' effort in developing a family of services for building and querying an enterprise knowledge graph in order to address this challenge. We first acquire data from various sources via different approaches. Furthermore, we mine useful information from the data by adopting a variety of techniques, including Named Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction; such mined information is further integrated with existing structured data (e.g., via Entity Linking techniques) in order to obtain relatively comprehensive descriptions of the entities. By modeling the data as an RDF graph model, we enable easy data management and the embedding of rich semantics in our data. Finally, in order to facilitate the querying of this mined and integrated data, i.e., the knowledge graph, we propose TR Discover, a natural language interface that allows users to ask questions of our knowledge graph in their own words; such natural language questions are then translated into executable queries for answer retrieval. We evaluate our services, i.e., named entity recognition, relation extraction, entity linking and natural language interface, on real-world datasets, and demonstrate and discuss their practicability and limitations.