We present a tangible origami-based artefact designed to explore how artefacts can foreground ecological entanglements by embodying movement, fragility, and responsiveness. Drawing on a Research through Design (RtD) practice-led approach using a diffractive lens rooted in new materialist philosophy, and inspired by expressive and defensive behaviours in plants and animals, the artefact combines rhythmic “breathing” actuation, colour change, and contraction to evoke a sense of aliveness and ambiguity. We contribute the design of a diffractive, tangible origami artefact intended to evoke aliveness and artefact agency, and a design process demonstrating diffraction as a generative lens for more-than-human HCI.

Abstract Visual data is an integral part of qualitative research, yet it is not always clear to researchers how to use or interpret it once gathered. Existing methods for qualitative data analysis largely rely on textual approaches such as thematic analysis, or grounded theory. Open coding is a term that is frequently used to describe a analysis that follows a logical—yet undocumented—process, but these can often be applied ad hoc, and are necessarily created after the fact of data collection. Researchers often develop their own ways of interrogating visual data, but can struggle to prove the legitimacy of not employing an existing approach. This article outlines a proven and replicable process for the analysis of static visual imagery that has been developed by the author and utilised together with research collaborators over a seven year period. The approach, which I call Annotated Visual Analysis (AVA), can be used for sketched or artistic data from participants or in first person, subjective research, in order to generate insight, gather requirements or confirm hypotheses. Here, I outline five case studies using the approach in differing contexts, in order to demonstrate its applicability, and outline the process and guidelines so that other researchers might employ the method. I also discuss the need for other researchers using visual methods to share and consolidate their forms of analysis to develop knowledge for use by others in the field.

Reflection provides students and instructors insight into mindsets, learning progress, and course design. However, most reflective activities in HCI courses focus on specific skills and content. We propose sketching as a flexible and expressive medium for reflecting on larger topics to reveal implicit perspectives about multifaceted concepts of HCI. We developed “Sketching Snapshots,” an activity to elicit student perspectives on high-level concepts. To evaluate this activity, we ran pre- and post-semester workshops in two HCI courses in the US and UK. We analyze 68 sketches from 41 students, 9 student interviews, and 2 instructor interviews and find that sketching is effective for supporting student and instructor reflection. We then report case studies in two additional contexts and synthesize recommendations for deploying reflective sketching. We propose incorporating Sketching Snapshots in courses can facilitate reflection on complex concepts, improve teaching, and spark conversations about what HCI means to us and our students.

When a robot is developed, it usually has well-defined physical and occupational characteristics that are often gendered. This can influence the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) experience and also risks fostering harmful gender stereotypes in society. One factor contributing to gender attribution to robots is their voice, which can be manipulated and changed to fit any need. Thanks to the recent development of gender-ambiguous voices, this provides an interesting research space to investigate if this modality can reduce robot gendering. Our research investigates whether these voices influence how people picture a robot in different occupational contexts. We asked participants to sketch a robot after listening to either a gender-ambiguous voice presenting a neutral, feminine, masculine scenario, a female voice presenting a feminine scenario, or a male voice presenting a masculine scenario. Results indicate that an ambiguous voice influences gender associations, as participants were less likely to assign a gender to their sketched robots when exposed to an ambiguous voice, compared to a male or female voice. This finding highlights the potential of deploying ambiguous voices to reduce gender biases in HRI, even in stereotypically gendered roles, such as security guards or secretaries.

Through co-design with patients undergoing hemodialysis and their healthcare professionals, we worked towards discovering how to create a personalised, welcoming, yet quick and accurate method for medical instruction communication. Exploring possibilities of meeting the widely differing goals of patients and their healthcare professionals led to designing a personalise-able method for creating comics. Through ongoing discussions during the comic creation process, we explored variations in comic styles and personalisation factors such as choosing and modifying the appearance of the comic personalities, the settings, the central topics, and word usage to create the comics. Interest in using the approach that supports the creation of medical comics was high among patients and healthcare professionals. Rich feedback was obtained about information to be included and future direction for such medical comic creation support. We reflect on lessons learned during co-design with healthcare givers and patients.

This one-day studio aims to catalyze discussions and experimentation around non-textual academic documentation methods. With the understanding that human knowledge transcends written words, we aim to explore innovative ways to present and disseminate research outputs in diverse forms and of varying materiality. By bringing together researchers, practitioners, and academics from different disciplines and backgrounds, we seek to challenge the status quo of textual output and envision a future where knowledge production embraces the multisensory nature of human data.

Abstract This paper focuses on interaction across and between the physical/digital divide. We use blending theory to design for these situations, otherwise known as conceptual integration. Initially, this paper offers a discussion of the literature around blends. From this literature, we applied Benyon’s (Benyon, 2014) proposition of conceptual integration in mixed reality spaces (Blended Spaces) to consider interactions with the digital that complement the physical. We investigated blended spaces in partnership with undergraduate students during a live theatre festival. Our collaborators designed applications that applied blending principles, employing techniques drawn from speculative design. Outputs consist of speculative, narrative storyboards that use data gathered directly from stakeholder interviews and over 380 festival visitors. Our work led us to propose reworking Blended Spaces into a model that novice designers could easily conceive and apply. The work we conducted highlighted the need to consider user transitions from physical to digital and back again and highlighted the experiential nature of this type of interaction.

Travel is an integral part of our lives, whether for work or leisure. Since the advent of photography, we have documented our journeys, often sharing the images with friends and family to reflect upon the experience, tell stories, or invite commentary. We often lose ourselves in digital media – film, documentary and games – particularly during times when physical travel is unavailable. In this pictorial, we explore the travels of a single player through hundreds of games, presenting annotated game screenshots as photo-documentary through gamescapes, and as a form of the New Games Journalism. We present a New Games Travelogue traversing and formulating the psychogeography of games as imaginary places, and through this process, we unveil transdisciplinary tensions in negotiating and perceiving the importance of visual knowledge in games research, encouraging other researchers to join us in this practice.

Digital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what is software and what is the world, requiring designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services and spaces if they want to orchestrate meaningful experiences that are specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places and things. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. The pictorial details the results of a twelve-day workshop focusing on real-world audience and performer problems during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it illustrates how two distinct tools, the Blended Experiences Tool and the Evaluation Tool, focusing on the creation of a blended experience and respectively meant to provide a structured way to approach the generative and reflective stages of the design process, can be used to address this gap. This pictorial illustrates the theoretical framing supporting the Blended Experiences Tool; describes how the workshop produced Laugh Traders, a speculative experience centering on attending and reviewing comedy shows; provides a page-by-page pictorial storyboard of the Laugh Trader experience; introduces the Evaluation Tool and applies it to Laugh Trader to measure the relevance, complexity, and attractiveness of the resulting blended experience. Preliminary reflections conclude the pictorial.

Data-physicalizations encode data and meaning through geometry or material properties, providing a non-planar view of data, offering novel opportunities for interrogation, discovery and presentation. This field has explored how single users interact with complex 3D data, but the challenges in the application of this technology to collaborative situations have not been addressed. We describe a study exploring interactions and preferences among co-located individuals using a dynamic data-physicalization in the form of a shape-changing bar chart, and compare this to previous work with single participants. Results suggest that co-located interactions with physical data prompt non-interactive hand gestures, a mirroring of physicalizations, and novel hand gestures in comparison to single participant studies. We also note that behavioural similarities in participants between interactive tabletop studies and data-physicalizations may be capitalised upon for further development of these dynamic representations. Finally, we consider the implications and challenges for the adoption of these types of platforms.

The conversational nature of sketches is a widespread topic of research. Understanding drawing as a cognitive activity is commonly accepted, and many of the most extensively used methods within Human-Computer Interaction recruit sketching as a technique for ideation, explanation, documentation, and conversation. To further develop the use of this illustration process as a tool of knowledge production, we suggest a novel sketching method. We present Conversational Composites: a flexible method grounded in the material and tangible qualities of sketching in different forms and media, creating physical and digital layers of conversation between participants. We present and reflect on the proposed method through an applied case of a conversation between a PhD student and her supervisor, and offer suggestions on how it may be adapted and appropriated by other researchers in the HCI community.

Dealing with complex information regarding cyber security risks is increasingly important as attacks rise in frequency. Visualisation techniques are used to support decision-making and insight. However, the use of visualisations across different stakeholders and cyber security risk data is not well explored. This work presents an exploratory study in which participants use sketching to represent cyber-risk data. We critically discuss the method and our results demonstrate the usefulness of the method to identify new, diverse visualisation approaches, as well as the richness of stakeholder visualisation conceptualisation.

The technologies we use in everyday contexts are designed and tested, using existing standards of usability. As technology advances standards are still based on planar displays and simple screen-based interactions. End-user digital devices need to consider context and physicality as additional influences on design. Additionally, accessibility and multi-modal interaction must be considered as we build technologies with interactions such as soundscapes to support user experience. When considering the tools we use to design existing interactions, we can evaluate new ways of working with software to support the development of the changing face of interactive devices. This paper presents two prototypes which explore the space of user experience design tools, first in the space of contextual cues when looking at multi device interaction, and second, in the space of physical prototyping. These prototypes are starting points for a wider discussion around the changing face of usability. We also discuss extending the scope of existing user experience design tools and rethinking what ”user experience” means when the devices we own are becoming ’aware’ of their surroundings, context, and have increasing agency.

Do humans dream of electronic and digital devices? Or are our dreams free of technology, its influences and disruptions. When technology does appear, what part does it play in our subconscious narratives? Dreams are a reflection and distillation of our daily cognitive processes and waking experiences, and ubiquitous items such as mobile phones have become part of our everyday existence. This pictorial explores subjective dream imagery and narrative concerning the appearance and user experience of technology within our subconscious.

Existing work on personality traits in software development excludes game developers as a discrete group. Whilst games are software, game development has unique considerations, so game developers may exhibit different personality traits from other software professionals. We assessed responses from 123 game developers on an International Personality Item Pool Five Factor Model scale and demographic questionnaire using factor analysis. Programmers reported lower Extraversion than designers, artists and production team members; lower Openness than designers and production, and reported higher Neuroticism than production—potentially linked to burnout and crunch time. Compared to published norms of software developers, game developers reported lower Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Agreeableness, but higher Neuroticism. These personality differences have many practical implications: differences in Extraversion among roles may precipitate communication breakdowns; differences in Openness may induce conflict between programmers and designers. Understanding the relationship between personality traits and roles can help recruiters steer new employees into appropriate roles, and help managers apply appropriate stress management techniques. To realise these benefits, individuals must be distinguished from roles: just because an individual occupies a role does not mean they possess personality traits associated with that role.

Digital fabrication technologies such as laser cutters have been widely used for supporting prototyping of interactive devices as they are able to work with a wide range of materials. However, the majority of laser cut prototype components are often unable to support interaction or visualisation capabilities within themselves (e.g., functionality embedded within the material). Often materials that are laser cut do not have functional properties aside from serving as enclosures for interactive components. Our work explores how optical properties of clear Perspex material can be exploited to support interaction and visualisation capabilities for interface prototyping. Our proposed fabrication approach demonstrates the potential to support the development of novel displays devices that do not require expensive or complex circuitry and electronics. We produce a light-sensitive button and a seven-segment display which are combined into a wearable watch prototype demo. We also discuss design implications and future direction for this work.

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.

The increasing ubiquity of interactions as a mix between digital content and physical objects and spaces, brings about new challenges for designers. There is a need to embed digital systems in physical places, whether those are existing physical structures or existing digital platforms. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. They do not consider how designers produce new digital and physical experiences that work harmoniously to provide new forms of engagement. To address this, we illustrate the constructs of blended experiences and how they can be used in the context of bridging green spaces between different countries. We propose the idea of blended experiences and offer a framework of constructs and techniques that can help designers work in this emerging area of design.

Cybersecurity-related concepts can be difficult to explain or summarise. The complexity associated with these concepts is compounded by the impact of rapid technological changes and the contextual nature of the meaning ascribed to the various themes. Since visual imagery is often employed in articulation and explanation, we conducted a study in which we asked participants to sketch their understanding of cybersecurity concepts. Based on an analysis of these sketches and subsequent discussions with participants, we make the case for the use of sketching and visuals as a tool for cybersecurity research. Our collection of sketches and icons can further serve as the seed for a visual vocabulary for cybersecurity-related interfaces and communication.

Tangible toolkits enable individuals to explore concepts through combining components together and taking them apart. The strength and limitation of many e-textile toolkits is that threads hold them in place, and once put together they need destructive methods to take them apart. In this paper, we propose Punch-Sketching e-textiles, a drawing technique that uses a punch needle to iteratively prototype soft circuits. The benefits of this approach is sustainability and reusability where users can easily pull out circuits without damaging the materials or creating waste, while also testing out concepts using the actual threads that will be used in the final prototype. To validate our technique, we ran three studies comparing sewing and punching e-textiles through: 1) Understanding the process with two fiber artists; 2) Exploring the potential with four beginner users; and 3) Utilizing our methods further with 10 occupational therapists. Insights from these three studies include when and how to use each method, toolkit recommendations, considerations for iterative physical prototyping, sustainability, and accessibility.

Millions of people use mobile map applications like Google Maps on a regular basis. However, despite these applications' ubiquity, the literature contains very little information about how these applications are used in the real world. As such, many researchers and practitioners seeking to improve mobile map applications may not be able to identify important challenges and may miss major opportunities for innovation. To address this paucity of usage information, we collected and analysed data during unsupervised usage of Google Maps by replacing the standard application with a wrapped version called MapRecorder. In two studies we recorded data from locals and tourists using our application and collected over 580 minutes of actual application usage from 34 users, spanning 555 unique sessions. We identify typical usage scenarios, observe a large amount of map exploration and elucidate generalisable interaction patterns.

In this paper, we present a method of Dialogical Sketching. We introduce the development of this method as a discursive aid to understanding design probe responses within participatory co-design engagements but also articulate its potential more broadly within participatory research. Situated within a research study into the potential of digital jewellery to support self, we focus on how sketching can elucidate reflection on layers of meaning conveyed both explicitly and implicitly in participants' probe responses. The method enabled an iterative dialogue not bound by certainty, but more by inference, interpretation and suggested meanings. Systems of sketching scaffolded conversations about personal issues and feelings that were difficult to articulate in a way that was imaginative, rather than descriptive. We argue that the method firstly enriches the potential of probes, secondly encourages discourse in open and often uncertain ways and thirdly can enable sustained participatory engagement even through challenging circumstances.

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.

We investigate engaging a computer science conference audience in sketching responses to the event as it occurs. In particular, we explore the response to inviting those present to engage in what is essentially an off-line, co-located, attendee-sourcing experience. Sketchnoting is a popular practice for documenting events, but these sketched records can be limited in scope at multi-track conferences, and paid professionals can be unaffordable at smaller events. Our challenges included: working with an audience with little or no experience of sketching or working with imagery; who were unaware of the possible benefits; and whose attendee engagement was variable - with individuals often working on laptops rather than actively listening during sessions. In order encourage engagement we hosted a pre-conference workshop, developed a conference-specific set of visual icons, and created prompt materials. This resulted in a remarkable visual record of the event, and also an increase in active listening and engagement.

Providing data visualization authoring tools for the general public remains an ongoing challenge. Inspired by block-printing, we explore how visualization stamps as a physical visualization authoring tool could leverage both visual freedom and ease of repetition. We conducted a workshop with two groups---visualization experts and non-experts---where participants authored visualizations on paper using hand-carved stamps made from potatoes and sponges. The low-fidelity medium freed participants to test new stamp patterns and accept mistakes. From the created visualizations, we observed several unique traits and uses of block-printing tools for visualization authoring, including: modularity of patterns, annotation guides, creation of multiple patterns from one stamp, and various techniques to apply data onto paper. We discuss the issues around expressivity and effectiveness of block-printed stamps in visualization authoring, and identify implications for the design and assembly of primitives in potential visualization stamp kits, as well as applications for future use in non-digital environments.

Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilized or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric version that both changes shape and colour (ActuEater2). Four in-situ deployments of 'ActuEaters' in different dinner settings and subsequent 'design crits' showed insights into how people perceive, interpret and interact with such slow-technology in interesting (and often unexpected) ways. The results of our 'ActuEating' studies provide evidence for how an actuating artefact can be simultaneously a resource for social engagement and an interactive decorative. In response, we explore design opportunities for situating novel interactive materials in everyday settings, taking the leap into a new generation of interactive spaces, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities.

In this paper we explore the motivations for, and practicalities of, incorporating "implications for adoption" into HCI research practice. Implications for adoption are speculations which may be used in research projects to scrutinize and explore the implications and requirements associated with a technology's potential adoption in the future. There is a rich tradition within the HCI community of implementing, demonstrating, and testing new interactions or technologies by building prototypes. User-centered design methods help us to develop prototypes to and move toward designs that are validated, efficient, and rewarding to use. However, these studies rarely shift their temporal focus to consider, in any significant detail, what it would mean for a technology to exist beyond its prototypical implementation, in other words how these prototypes might ultimately be adopted. Given the CHI community's increasing interest in technology-related human and social effects, the lack of attention paid to adoption represents a significant and relevant gap in current practices. It is this gap that the paper addresses and in doing so offers three contributions: (1) exploring and unpacking different notions of adoption from varying disciplinary perspectives; (2) discussing why considering adoption is relevant and useful, specifically in HCI research; (3) discussing methods for addressing this need, specifically design fiction, and understanding how utilizing these methods may provide researchers with means to better understand the myriad of nuanced, situated, and technologically-mediated relationships that innovative designs facilitate.