Augmented Reality (AR) gamification shows growing promise as an approach to the design of rehabilitation tools, but evidence on intervention effectiveness remains difficult to synthesise and compare across systems and studies. As part of a broader scoping review, we analyse 21 papers that report on AR gamified rehabilitation and examine how design choices, mechanisms, and measurement practices are connected in those studies. Our analysis reveals a recurring Design – Mechanism – Measurement (D-M-M) misalignment: systems increasingly combine heterogeneous AR delivery and sensing pipelines with gamified feedback, yet intervention mechanisms are rarely specified as testable pathways, and evaluations more often emphasise usability and feasibility of tools than indicators of rehabilitation change. We argue that future work should report AR gamified rehabilitation as an explicit intervention logic and make minimal D-M-M claims linking core design ingredients to hypothesised mechanisms and aligned measures. The next phase of this work will extend the same analytic lens across the wider review corpus to examine whether this pattern is specific to rehabilitation or reflects broader reporting tendencies in AR gamified physical activity research.

Physical inactivity remains a persistent public health challenge, while many digital interventions struggle to sustain engagement beyond initial novelty. This PhD investigates how Augmented Reality (AR) gamified systems can be designed to support sustained motivation and participation in everyday physical activity. The research frames AR gamified interventions as experience-centred interactive systems that can shape how movement is experienced in embodied, situated, and potentially social ways. The research adopts a multi-phase, mixed-methods approach combining an ongoing scoping review, formative inquiry, iterative prototype development, and early-stage mechanism-informed evaluation. It is expected to contribute a clearer conceptual, methodological, and design-oriented account of how AR gamified systems may support daily physical activity in more meaningful and sustainable ways.

Deepfake technology is often used to create non-consensual synthetic intimate imagery (NSII), mainly of celebrity women. Through Critical Discursive Psychological analysis, we ask; i) how celebrities construct being targeted by deepfakes and ii) how they navigate infrastructural and social obstacles when seeking recourse. In this paper, we adopt Baumer’s concept of “Usees” (stakeholders who are non-consenting, unaware and directly targeted by technology), to understand public statements made by eight celebrity women and one non-binary individual targeted with NSII. Celebrities describe harms of being non-consensually targeted by deepfakes and they describe various infrastructural/social factors) which hinder activism and recourse. This work has implications in recognizing the roles of infrastructures underlying deepfake abuse and the potential of human-computer interaction to improve existing recourses for NSII. We also contribute to understanding false victim-blaming rhetoric about deepfake abuse. Future work should involve interventions which challenge values and false beliefs which motivate NSII creation/dissemination.

Much early research on deepfakes has focused on speculating about potential future harms of the technology. Everyday uses and experiences of existing deepfake content are, surprisingly, comparatively understudied. For example, there is little research that seeks to understand how people encounter and respond to deepfake content in today's entertainment media. In this study, we conducted a thematic analysis of user's comments made in response to a Kendrick Lamar YouTube music video that featured deepfake content. In total, we analysed 1467 comments. Our findings are described by six themes; advancing realism of deepfakes, seeing is not believing, predicting dystopian threats, enhancing the experience of the song, strong emotional reactions, and 'a toy for play'. People generally enjoyed the creativity and emotional impact that deepfakes brought to the video but those who were unaware of deepfake technology were left confused and doubting themselves. This study offers a naturalistic view of how deepfakes are encountered in everyday life.

Players who enjoy challenging games frequently face failure and must demonstrate persistence to succeed. Persistence through failure, albeit difficult to learn, is a skill that is valuable across many aspects of life. It may be useful to study how those who seek out challenging games understand and deal with failure, and how game design contributes to this experience. This study aimed to deepen the knowledge available using a qualitative methodology. Ten participants played the challenging platform game “Celeste” for a week before taking part in a 30-minute semi-structured interview. Reflexive Thematic Analysis generated five primary themes: Making Meaning of Failure, 2) Seeing Purpose in Failure, 3) Accepting Difficult Experiences, 4) Drawing Persistence from Design and 5) Differentiating Persistence in Life and Play. Results emphasize the centrality of goals and consequence in shaping player responses to failure, and outline that an encouraging, learning-focused game environment where failure is functional favours persistence. Challenge-readiness, striving for growth and mastery, analytical thinking, break-taking, involving friends in gameplay and self-efficacy also facilitated persistence, with the latter being transferred across the contexts of life and play. Directions for future research, implications for game design and suggestions for interventions targeting positive failure responses are discussed.

DNA-based digital data storage technology is hailed as a potential solution for the issues around exponential global data production. However, while the technology continues to strive towards its full commercialization, there is a lack of discourse on how it could be applied to facilitate interactions that are meaningful, ethical, and socially sustainable. As an approach to address this gap, we hosted a series of online workshops, soliciting 15 participants to engage in grounded speculations on plausible futures of DNA data storage. Themes drawn from the resulting imaginaries and discussions were situated within a selection of existing HCI literature, to generate an initial set of design opportunities and challenges for DNA data storage. Early analysis suggests that the system could be designed to 1) facilitate meaningful interactions that are intangible and molecular, and 2) foster better human relationship with more-than-human entities. Furthermore, we highlight the imperative for cross-disciplinary collaborations and pedagogy, to ensure fair and high quality access to the technology.

eHealth coaching is a promising approach for delivering effective, person-centered, digital health interventions. Yet, the way eHealth coaches ‘tailor’ interventions using technology is currently unclear. This study aims to understand how eHealth coaches tailor support to clients seeking to lose weight. Nine in-depth interviews with eHealth coaches were conducted. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis, deriving three themes: ‘Understanding the client,’ ‘Adapting Support,’ and ‘Navigating challenges.’ Coaches used both assessment tools and their growing relationship to understand client's needs. Coaches adapted the pace and nature of educational content, utilized their clients' preferred technologies, and adopted different personas to meet the needs of each individual. Providing tailored support also presented challenges for eHealth coaches, with technology eroding personal and professional boundaries. Our work interrogates what it means to ‘tailor’ support, through exploring coaching as a humanistic approach to behaviour change, with implications for the design of person-centered digital coaching interventions/systems.

Recent HCI scholarship has critiqued anthropocentrism in design as contributing to the ecological crisis. The current paper contributes theoretically and empirically to this area, adopting the lens of Socio-Ecological Relations, inspired by Environmental History and STS. We argue that a socio-ecological lens can offer practical tools to HCI and Interaction Design to overcome the separation between humanity and nature-as-a-resource. For this reason, our unit of analysis is humanity-in-nature and nature-in-humanity, and we show how this double internality becomes visible using an historical and geographical approach in the design process. Methodologically, using Situational Analysis, we analyse an Action Research project that introduced a digital platform for community radio in rural contexts. We find that Socio-Ecological Relations, performed in specific places, shape the design process and are themselves transformed by becoming part of it. We provide a set of sensitivities for operationalizing this approach for design researchers.

Online health communities provide a space where people seek out and provide support for weight loss activities, including tracking. Our study examined the experiences of members of an online community (r/loseit on Reddit.com) who posted about using digital tracking tools for weight loss. A targeted search garnered 379 public posts, which were analyzed using Thematic Analysis. Four themes reflected members’ individual and shared experiences: Tracking as gaining insight, Tracking as a vehicle of control, Confronting challenges in sustaining tracking and Teaching and learning the skills of tracking. We highlight complex socio-technical processes that members developed around tracking tools and discuss how knowledge of these appropriations can be applied to designing future user-centered tracking tools to support weight loss. We discuss how the social context of an online health community can shape both the usage of tracking tools and self-regulatory processes for health behaviour change.

Licencing frameworks are embedded with sociotechnical imaginaries that limit the potential for networked technologies to make traditional media forms, like radio, more inclusive. We sought to refine and extend a platform, RootIO, which aims to enable diverse people to run small radio stations by using internet and mobile networks that avoid the costs of studios and specialist equipment. We situated design and refinement in the activities of groups that set up and ran four community stations in rural Romania and some Irish islands over three-years and found national regulations limited who articulated requirements. Activities in applying for, and complying with, licences shaped design priorities, embedded temporal demands, certain organisational structures and division of responsibilities, and assumptions about studios and professionalism. Indeed, small radio stations are subject to the same values as large media corporations that pursue market power. Regulatory frameworks are specific to nations and media form, yet our analysis illustrates that they impede designing platforms to widen inclusion by enacting broader sociotechnical imaginaries. We hope this reflection provokes discussion, in HCI and CSCW, about our responsibilities in engaging with the policies that shape possible futures.

Background: Exertion games are video games that require exercise. They are widely presented as health interventions, to encourage sedentary populations to take exercise at levels recommended by health professionals. Objectives: We consider whether games encourage acute exercise at levels sufficient to engender exercise-related health benefits, and in what conditions that occurs. Methods: In this article, we performed a scoping review of empirical research that examines whether exertion game play engenders exercise, searching Google Scholar, Scopus, and PubMed. Results: From 3171 search records, we found 243 studies of acute short-term exercise in games. While some observed moderate levels of exertion, players of many games fail to meet recommended levels. Few games encouraged vigorous levels seen in sports. Variation in results for games across different studies suggests that exertion motivation is highly dependent on nongame contextual factors. There is evidence games make exercise more enjoyable or reduce perceived exertion, but many studies suffer the methodological problem of comparison with boring control conditions. Conclusions: Exergames have only been found comparable to exercise such as walking, jogging, and dancing under very specific circumstances. To improve evidence for games as exercise interventions, we must improve study designs and focus on understanding better the circumstances likely to bring about genuine exergame exercise.

This article contributes to research that aims to better understand and describe the rural context for rural computing. We argue that the particularities of rurality are heightened by the experience of ‘islandness’. We report on our experiences of engaging on one small island as islanders established community radio using a novel platform. Data comes from 12 semi-structured interviews with community members and ethnographic field notes assembled through eight researcher visits to the island. Transcripts and notes were analysed using thematic analysis. We discuss how rural islandness as a socio-cultural lens influenced technology appropriation and factors to support participation. We explore the elements of rural islandness that can be used as an analytic tool for rural HCI and HCI more broadly, through three main contributions of rural islandness that we believe have not yet been sufficiently explored in HCI. These are (1) separateness, (2) pushing things ahead, and (3) publics and rural pluralities.

We argue for a new way of using pictorial publications to communicate the social, cultural, and material contexts in which "in the wild" research is carried out. Such research often allows for partial researcher perspectives, as the researchers travel to, encounter, and leave those places. However, in HCI research, the journeys and interactions in and around those places are rarely reported directly in archival papers. We argue that those journeys and interactions directly inform how we make sense of the project, and thus should be recorded and shared appropriately. We argue that pictorials can be a format that breaks the boundary between "supplementary materials" and archival publications, and allows us to do that sharing function. We illustrate this argument through reporting of our Research Journey to a number of islands off the west coast of Ireland as part of a project that is developing technology to support rural community radio.

Rural communities often lack platforms to support civic engagement and local deliberation. Community radio is intended to facilitate such functions, yet, radio technologies can be expensive and complex to use. To tackle this challenge, low-barrier radio technologies are becoming available. We argue that technology to support civic engagement and local deliberation are important, and design of such platforms must take into consideration specific community needs. We contribute by exploring the needs of three rural European communities. Findings indicate that communities are now distributed beyond place. Platforms for deliberation must include both hyper-local and geographically dispersed populations. Rural values of accountability, reliability and maintaining social harmony are important design considerations. Community radio platforms should support geographically distributed community connections, sharing of health and emergency information, preservation of heritage and as a space for advocacy and civic action.

Access to wheelchair skills training is important for the mobility and independence of wheelchair users, but training rates are low - particularly among young people. In this paper, we present Geometry Wheels, a movement-based experience prototype to explore the potential of interactive technology to support basic wheelchair skills training for manual wheelchair users, designed with the support of occupational therapists. Results of an evaluation with 15 participants (10 young wheelchair users and 5 parents) show that interactive systems can deliver engaging and challenging activities that encourage wheelchair navigation and activity. However, the project also revealed challenges in designing for individual differences in physical abilities, in conflicts between children's and parents' perceptions of ability, and barriers to home use. We outline strategies for the design of rehabilitative technology to help young people with disabilities build physical abilities.

This article presents a qualitative driving simulator study designed to understand the experience of giving up control to automated processes in semiautonomous driving systems. The study employed an experience prototyping methodology, with 12 drivers (4 female) completing 2 sessions in a high-fidelity driving simulator. Condition A simulated a normally functioning car, while Condition B simulated a semiautonomous system that monitors driver behavior and takes evasive action when danger is detected. The simulator experience was used to ground wider discussion of automation and the experience of driving, which was explored through a semistructured interview. Results identify design challenges for autonomous driving systems; the loss of user agency and confidence, and handling the change between manual and automated control. Opportunities were identified; in augmenting rather than removing human abilities, and in providing new learning opportunities for drivers.

HCI often requires scholars to build upon research from fields outside their expertise, creating the risk that foundational work is misunderstood and misrepresented. The prevailing goal of "exergames" research towards ameliorating obesity appears to be built on just such a misunderstanding of health research. In this paper, we analyse all citations to a single influential study, which has been extensively cited to justify research on exergames. We categorise the 375 citations based on whether they represent the findings of that study accurately or inaccurately. Our findings suggest that 69% of exergames papers citing this study misrepresent the findings, demonstrating a systematic failure of scholarship in exergames research. We argue that exergaming research should cease focusing on games as treatment for obesity, and that HCI publications should demand more critical and scholarly engagement with research from outside HCI.

Young people using powered wheelchairs have limited access to engaging leisure activities. We address this issue through a two-stage project; 1) the participatory development of a set of wheelchair-controlled, movement-based games (with 9 participants at a school that provides education for young people who have special needs) and 2) three case studies (4 participants) exploring player perspectives on a set of three wheelchair-controlled casual games. Our results show that movement-based playful experiences are engaging for young people using powered wheelchairs. However, the participatory design process and case studies also reveal challenges for game accessibility regarding the integration of movement in games, diversity of abilities among young people using powered wheelchairs, and the representation of disability in games. In our paper, we explore how to address those challenges in the development of accessible, empowering movement-based games, which is crucial to the wider participation of young people using powered wheelchairs in play.

A number of digital platforms and services have recently emerged that allow users to create posthumous forms of communication, effectively arranging for the delivery of messages from "beyond the grave". Despite some evidence of interest and popularity of these services, little is known about how posthumous messages may impact the people who receive them. We present a qualitative study that explores the type of experiences potentially triggered upon receiving such messages. Our findings firstly suggest that posthumous messaging services have the potential to alter the relationship between the bereaved and the deceased, and secondly provide insight into how users make sense of this altered relationship. Through the inference of a set of design considerations for posthumous communication services, we reveal a number of conflicts that are not easily solvable through technological means alone, and which may serve as starting points for further research. Our work extends the growing body of research that is concerned with digital interactions related to death and dying.

Non-digital forms of play that allow players to direct brute force directly upon each other, such as martial arts, boxing and full contact team sports, are very popular. However, inter-player brutality has largely been unexplored as a feature of digital gaming. In this paper, we describe the design and study of 2 multi-player games that encourage players to use brute force directly against other players. Balance of Power is a tug-of-war style game implemented with Xbox Kinect, while Bundle is a playground-inspired chasing game implemented with smartphones. Two groups of five participants (n=10) played both games while being filmed, and were subsequently interviewed. A thematic analysis identified five key components of the brutal multiplayer video game experience, which informs a set of seven design considerations. This work aims to inspire the design of engaging game experiences based on awareness and enjoyment of our own and others' physicality.

Recent research suggests that motion-based video games have the potential to provide both mental and physical stimulation for older adults in residential care. However, little research has explored the practical challenges and opportunities that arise from integrating these games within existing schedules of activities in these contexts. In our work, we report on a qualitative enquiry that was conducted over a three month period at two long-term care facilities. Findings suggest that older adults enjoyed playing video games, and that games can be a valuable means of re-introducing challenge in late life, but that the impact of age-related changes and impairment can influence people's ability to engage with games in a group setting. We outline core challenges in the design for care context and discuss implications of our work regarding the suitability of games as a self-directed leisure activity.

There is growing interest in technology that quantifies aspects of our lives. This paper draws on critical practice and speculative design to explore, question and problematise the ultimate consequences of such technology using the quantification of companion animals (pets) as a case study. We apply the concept of "moving upstream" to study such technology and use a qualitative research approach in which both pet owners, and animal behavioural experts, were presented with, and asked to discuss, speculative designs for pet quantification applications, the design of which were extrapolated from contemporary trends. Our findings indicate a strong desire among pet owners for technology that has little scientific justification, whilst our experts caution that the use of technology to augment human-animal communication has the potential to disimprove animal welfare, undermine human-animal bonds, and create human-human conflicts. Our discussion informs wider debates regarding quantification technology.

Neurological Vision Impairment (NVI) detrimentally impacts upon quality of life, as daily activities such as reading and crossing the road often become significantly impaired. Therapy strategies for NVI based on visual scanning of on-screen stimuli have recently been demonstrated as effective at improving functional vision. However, these strategies are repetitive, monotonous and unsuitable for use with children and young adults. This project explores the design of a game-based therapy programme that aims to support participant engagement and adherence. We first outline requirements for this software, before reporting on the iterative design process undertaken in collaboration with young people, therapists and teachers at a centre for vision impairment. Our work provides insights into the participatory design of games in collaboration with young people with special needs, and reflects upon the tension of balancing game challenge, therapy goals, and accessibility. Furthermore, it highlights the potential of games to empower special populations by providing a medium through which to communicate the subjective experience of specific impairments.

There is an identified need for objective, reliable, and scalable methods of measuring and recording sleep. Such methods must be designed for easy integration into people's lives in order to support both sleep therapy and everyday personal informatics. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application to record sleep, the design of which has substantive foundation in clinical sleep research. Two user studies were carried out which demonstrate that the application produces valid measurements of sleep quality and high levels of usability, whilst not seriously disturbing sleep or the sleep environment. These findings suggest that the app is suitable for both everyday sleep monitoring in a personal informatics context, and for integration into sleep interventions.

This workshop is a continuation and extension to the successful past workshops including [4, 5, 6]. The workshop addresses the opportunities and challenges for the design of digital interactive systems that engage individuals in critical reflection on their everyday food practices -- including designing for engagement in more environmentally aware, socially inclusive, and healthier behaviour. These three themes represent the focus of much recent HCI work related to food. The workshop aims to further the conversation on these themes through understanding specifically how the process of critical reflection can be encouraged by interactive technology. While the focus will be on food as an application area, the intention is to also explore, more generally, how the process of critical reflection can be facilitated through interactive technology. The workshop provides a unique forum to discuss existing theoretical and pragmatic approaches, and to envision novel ways to design technology that encourages sustained critical reflection.

The design of technological interventions to motivate behaviour-based reductions in end-user energy consumption has recently been identified as a priority for the HCI community. Previous interventions have produced promising results, but have typically focused on domestic energy consumption. By contrast, this paper focuses on the workplace context, which presents very different opportunities and challenges. For instance, financial consequences, which have proved successful as motivations in the domestic environment, are not present in the workplace in the context of employees. We describe the outcome of a sequence of workshops that focussed on understanding employee perceptions of energy use in the workplace, with the locus of activity on energy intervention design. Using a grounded theory analysis, we produced a framework of key themes detailing user perceptions and energy intervention design considerations. Our findings provide a framework of considerations for the design of successful workplace energy interventions.

Emerging research has shown that social media services are being used as tools to disclose a range of personal health information. To explore the role of social media in the discussion of mental health issues, and with particular reference to insomnia and sleep disorders, a corpus of 18,901 messages - or Tweets - posted to the microblogging social media service Twitter were analysed using a mixed methods approach. We present a content analysis which revealed that Tweets that contained the word "insomnia" contained significantly more negative health information than a random sample, strongly suggesting that individuals were making disclosures about their sleep disorder. A subsequent thematic analysis then revealed two themes: coping with insomnia, and describing the experience of insomnia. We discuss these themes as well as the implications of our research for those in the interaction design community interested in integrating online social media systems in health interventions.

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with.

In this paper we describe the results of a controlled study of a social game, Magpies, which was built on the Facebook Online Social Network (OSN) and enhanced with contextual social information in the form of a variety of social network indices. Through comparison with a concurrent control trial using an identical game without the enhanced social information, it was shown that the additional contextual data increased the frequency of social activity between players engaged in the game. Despite this increase in activity, there was little increase in growth of the player-base when compared to the control condition. These findings corroborate previous work that showed how socio-contextual enhancement can increase performance on task-driven games, whilst also suggesting that it can increase activity and engagement when provided as context for non task-driven game environments.