Personal data and digital technologies increasingly shape children's daily experiences, but younger children are seldom presented with opportunities to reflect in-depth about their perspectives on personal data, beyond simple warnings about not sharing information online. We present Grasping Data, a set of portable activities aimed at helping children explore what counts as personal data, why some data feel more personal than others, and how meaning changes between audiences and purposes. The demo combines three linked tangible activities: a teddy-bear proxy for card sorting-based discussion, a wooden tangible prototype for self-generated activity data, and a set of shape-changing multi-material objects for embodied interpretation of personal data. For the IDC community, the demo contributes a 10-minute encounter highlighting concrete, research-based, low-tech methods to discuss personal data with young children across formal and informal learning settings.

Digital technologies in agriculture are typically portrayed as enabling more sustainable production while increasing productivity. Yet, commercial solutions rarely address the root causes of unsustainable farming, limiting the uptake of more radical solutions such as agroecology. We conducted fieldwork on 11 UK small-scale agroecological farms investigating their adoption of digital technologies. Far from being anti-technological, agroecological farmers are currently poorly supported by appropriate digital tools. Further, the collaborative nature of agroecological farming, market productivity pressures, and regulatory requirements necessitate complex data practices for coordination, planning, monitoring, and learning. These data practices require labour that is often hidden and causes tension within farms. We develop these insights into a set of guiding principles for designing digital technologies appropriate for agroecology and suggest concrete design opportunities. We present a call to action for HCI to reimagine digital agriculture beyond capitalism and work with existing farmer-led grassroots networks towards technological sovereignty.

The number of HCI papers on care has grown rapidly in recent years. Despite growing interest in care both as an application domain for technology and as an ethical stance in research and design, our integrated understanding of the concept is limited. It remains unclear how various application areas of care relate to one another, to what extent their underlying assumptions align or contradict, and how they collectively shape HCI discourse on care. To address this, we present a meta-narrative review of 317 SIGCHI papers on care. We first outline the landscape of care in HCI. We then present six paradigmatic framings of care, and a conceptual map that positions these framings in relation to each other, their representative care–tech relations, and the temporal development of the field. We conclude by discussing the implications from the review, as well as gaps in the field and future directions.

Older adults are increasingly invited into speculative activities within HCI, yet little is known about how researchers facilitate these processes or how this population engages in shaping alternative presents and socio-technical futures. While speculative design methods often aim to support non-designers to contribute to design processes, engaging older adults poses unique challenges that complicate their involvement. To build a comprehensive understanding, we conducted a scoping review of 44 prior studies on speculative design involving older adults, focusing on the research objectives and methodological rationales, facilitation, and how older adults engage in speculation. Through this analysis, we identify persistent methodological tensions, opportunities to advance more inclusive speculative practices with aging populations, and suggest implications for future practice.

In this pictorial, we discuss the design of Exchangeopoly, a boardgame developed to investigate exchanges between people in communities when they help each other out. Such exchanges are often acts of kindness for forms of volunteering that are not remunerated financially and are built on social capital. The boardgame scaffolded explorations of scenarios with participants where informal altruistic interactions in their communities are tokenised, rewarded and incentivised. We focus on the designed-in features and considerations that went into the visual and material production of the game and its gameplay mechanics. We discuss how Exchangeopoly was a valuable method that surfaced existing and speculated practices of exchange, and supported participants to explore the opportunities and problems of representing and rewarding such interactions. We contribute insights about the usefulness of exchangeopoly as a tool to explore scenarios and surface tensions about tokenisation in community value exchange.

Text-to-image (T2I) generative AI tools like Midjourney are growing in capability and popularity, promising a wide range of applications.However, concerns are rising over the biases in how they represent social concepts like care and the lack of guidance for designers and users to address these in practice.This paper first presents an analysis of 140 "photos of care" generated by Midjourney, and then explores how prompting might influence the results.The findings reveal that AI-generated images reproduce stereotypical and reductive representations of care by default, neglecting the broad spectrums of care practices in everyday life.Furthermore, we find that while prompt engineering might mitigate certain biases, it requires specialised skills, knowledge, and an ongoing reflexive approach to generate meaningful outputs.We conclude by proposing a reflexive prompting framework, and discussing the implications for future T2I evaluation and its responsible use and design.

Unlike any previous generation, children's lives are now highly datafied, tracked, and digitally monitored.They are increasingly vulnerable to data collection from seemingly innocuous toys and devices with cameras, sensors, voice recognition, and geolocation.Yet, children typically lack awareness or control over these data exchanges, as consent is usually given by adult caregivers (who may also lack data literacy).Despite regulatory improvements, interdisciplinary approaches remain crucial to empowering children to understand, value, and manage their personal data.How can the IDC community involve children in the design and use of their personal data?This workshop unites experts to explore current practices.1 CCS Concepts• Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Human-centered computing → Interaction design 1 This workshop merged with "Towards a Research Agenda for Including Children and their Care Ecosystems in HCI" to run a joint workshop: Grasping Data Together: Interdisciplinary Agendas for Engaging Children and their Care Ecosystems with their personal data

Large language model (LLM) systems have been shown to stimulate creative thinking among creators, yet empirical research on whether users can seek inspiration in their everyday lives through these technologies is lacking. This paper explores which attributes of LLMs influence inspiration-seeking processes. Focusing on use cases of travel, cooking, and self-care, we interviewed 20 participants as they explored scenarios of these use cases using LLMs. Thematic analysis revealed that the vast data of LLMs inspires users with unexpected ideas, many of which were highly personalized, and inspired participants towards being motivated to act. Participants were also sensitive to the deficiencies of LLMs, and noted how ethical issues associated with these technologies could negatively impact them applying inspirational ideas into practice. We discuss the behavioral patterns of users actively seeking inspiration via LLMs, and provide design opportunities for LLMs that make the inspiration-seeking process more human-centric.

Precision Medicine (PM) transforms the traditional "one-drug-fits-all" paradigm by customising treatments based on individual characteristics, and is an emerging topic for HCI research on digital health. A key element of PM, the Polygenic Risk Score (PRS), uses genetic data to predict an individual's disease risk. Despite its potential, PRS faces barriers to adoption, such as data inclusivity, psychological impact, and public trust. We conducted a mixed-methods study to explore how people perceive PRS, formed of surveys (n=254) and interviews (n=11) with UK-based participants. The interviews were supplemented by interactive storyboards with the ContraVision technique to provoke deeper reflection and discussion. We identified ten key barriers and five themes to PRS adoption and proposed design implications for a responsible PRS framework. To address the complexities of PRS and enhance broader PM practices, we introduce the term Human-Precision Medicine Interaction (HPMI), which integrates, adapts, and extends HCI approaches to better meet these challenges.

Agentic AI is being heralded as the next step in the development of AI systems. Agentics, complex ensembles of different machine learning, data processing, and generative AI models, can provide new autonomous and proactive decision-making capabilities to organizations, participate in complex workflows, and, when needed, seek guidance from and provide insights to human users in natural languages. Collectively, we wish to explore how and why to design agentic systems to be situated within specific social and organizational contexts, the value of social theory and perspectives to this work, and the potential of this move to address critical issues with AI. Given the focus on social and organization context as essential to agentic design, we see this work as directly related to the ACM COMPASS 2025 theme “computing in place”. We seek to bring together scholars from the diversity of disciplines within ACM to develop research agendas, projects, and joint teaching initiatives that support the development of social agentic design and analysis.

Autistic adults find themselves embedded within digital environments that are largely designed by and for neurotypical people. These environments are often unsuitable and challenging for the neurodivergent. As a result, autistic people are exposed to high levels of stress when using digital technologies, and must invest extraordinary effort in coping with it. In this participatory design study, we partnered with 20 autistic adults to investigate how they handle the stress caused by social media use. Their ways of coping and their design work point at the most problematic aspects of the design of social media, and suggest alternative directions for these digital platforms. We conclude that participatory design grounded on autistic coping provides an opportunity for the neuro-diversification of technology design.

Amidst a growing body of work in HCI focusing on designing systems that engage with care relationships, there is increasing interest in expanding notions of care beyond transactional practices, towards broader notions of “care ecologies”. However, how can we support care systems designers to apply these concepts in practice? This paper presents the Care Spectrums, a set of sensitising concepts for designers to explore and apply to their practice. Developed as a response to a design probe exercise (the CareTree) which was carried out with 14 participants over one month, the Care Spectrums respond to the multiplicity of expressions of care in participants’ everyday lives. Translated into a design resource (the ‘Co-Designing with Care’ card deck), and trialled with 10 designers, the Care Spectrums revealed hidden caring and uncaring practices in designers’ projects, and stimulated opportunities for designing with and for people's complex and entangled care ecologies.

Recommender systems are increasingly employed by journalistic outlets to deliver personalised news, transforming news curation into a reciprocal yet insufficiently defined process influenced by editors, recommender systems, and individual user actions. To understand the tension in this dynamic and users’ preferences and perceptions of their role in personalised news curation, we conducted a study with UK participants aged 16-34. Building on a preliminary survey and interview study, which revealed a strong desire from participants for increased agency in personalisation, we designed an interactive news recommender provotype (provocative design artefact) which probed the role of agency in news curation with participants (n=16). Findings highlighted a behaviour-intention gap, indicating participants desire for agency yet reluctance to intervene actively in personalisation. Our research offers valuable insights into how users perceive their agency in personalised news curation, underscoring the importance for systems to be designed to support individuals becoming active agents in news personalisation.

This paper explores the value of a participant-led walking method, during which matters of place in urban or rural contexts are explored. While walking, a diverse dataset is collected, including audio recordings, photographs, GPS tracks, as well as three words that participants are prompted for at each stop along the walk via a bespoke web application. We used this approach in an urban community in the UK and a rural community in Greece as part of ongoing place-based initiatives. Our findings show how participants connected personal and emotional stories with structural issues, countered official, ‘authorised’ discourses about both places, and how maps and videos created after the walks acted as boundary objects. We reflect on the claims of walking as a method that fosters equitable researcher-participant relationships, outline future design directions for participatory walking and mapping technologies, and consider the value of walking methods and map-making for participatory design.

Sensor networks are increasingly commonplace in visions of smart cities and future healthcare systems, promising greater efficiency and increased wellbeing. However, the design of these technologies remains focused on specific users and fragmented by context, overlooking the diversity of needs, wants and values present when technologies, people, and lived realities interact within instrumented spaces. In this paper we present a workshop method – Sensing Care – that can help researchers, interdisciplinary design and development teams, and potentially affected users, to explore what it takes to design for living with sensor technologies that intersect and interact across private and public spaces, through speculative scenarios and role play. Drawing from three deployments of the workshop, we discuss how this approach supports the design of future care-oriented sensor networks, and helps designers understand what it means to live with complex technologies as people traverse diverse contexts.

In this paper, we critically examine the design of mainstream social media platforms from the point of view of autistic experiences and perspectives, drawing inspiration from the neurodiversity movement, the notion of autism as neurodivergence, and the concept of autistic sociality. We conducted 12 participatory design sessions with 20 autistic adult collaborators. Through thematic analysis of qualitative data, we identify seven challenges our participants experienced when using social media, and a set of imagined features that represent their vision of how design could better support their social media use. We discuss how mainstream social media platforms are primarily designed to address neurotypical sensitivities, and fail autistic adults through lack of user control, inadequate mechanisms for expressing tone and intention, and an orientation towards phatic interactions. To close, we outline how autistic sociality can inspire the design of kinder and more considerate social media platforms.

Autism is a developmental condition that impacts 1 in 100 people \citeNationalAutisticSociety2021. It affects autistic people's interactional and sensory preferences and behaviours. Autistic people can find interactions difficult in part due to sensory overwhelm. Interacting online can provide a positive alternative that allows for interactions on their own terms. However, most social media platforms are designed by neurotypical standards and can therefore inhibit full participation by autistic users. We demonstrate through the analysis of 34 semi-structured interviews with autistic adults that current social media design is not sufficient for creating an inclusive environment and enabling participation from autistic adults. We identified six themes across the interviews: (1) 'Social Media compared to In-Person Interactions', (2) 'Social Media as Enabling/Overwhelming', (3) 'Perceived Social Norms', (4) 'Keeping Connected and Finding New Communities', (5) 'Keeping Control through Systematic Practices', and (6) 'Being Authentic'. The themes demonstrate the attention that autistic adults give to online interaction, suggesting that online interactions may be just as fraught as in-person interactions have been shown to be. In order to become more inclusive of autistic adults, we recommend that social media platforms expand low-effort participation features, provide increased control over algorithmic content, support expression of intent and tone, aid discovery of interactional norms, and reinforce interest-based sociality.

Student mental health and wellbeing have come under increased scrutiny in recent years. Postgraduate research (PGR) students are at risk of experiencing mental health concerns and this, with the often isolated and competitive nature of their work, can impact their sense of community and social connectedness. In response to these concerns, we designed Pears, a system to connect PGR students for regular “pearings” (in-person meetings) and provide activities to promote reflection and conversation. A four-week evaluation of Pears with 15 students highlighted its potential to sometimes, but not always, facilitate peer support. Some participants would instead meet formally and according to their needs, others instead used the system to make new social connections. Additionally, some participants who faced work-related difficulties during the study found using the system contributed to their stress levels. We conclude by noting how technologies that encourage peer support can help build social relationships, providing an avenue to share similar PhD experiences and guidance for those new to the experience, while importantly raising awareness and an understanding for the need to take time for self-care. However, these technologies must be utilised carefully, and are not a replacement for other sources of student support in universities.

Young people facing marginalisation often rely on publicly funded services for support. Such services must include users in improving their provision, but often lack the processes and tools to facilitate this. The civic turn within HCI means that we are still tackling the complexities of community-based design research required to provide digital tools of relevance to public services. To address this, we worked with groups of young people to explore the design of a service evaluation process, supported by digital resources, intended to support marginalised youths to influence service delivery. Our findings demonstrate how the groups of young people participating in processes of service evaluation using our digital tools embraced the opportunity to express themselves. We also identify tensions from the social values underpinning the youth voluntary sector that impede their participation. We close by discussing challenges for community-based design and implications for digital technologies that facilitate the participation of marginalised young people in civic processes.

The conventional 'participant-as-informant' model of user research has recently been challenged by approaches that advocate for participants to have a greater authorial control over narratives that portray their lived experiences. This is particularly important for addressing relationships of power and representation. Informed by narrative approaches in social work, we report on a study exploring the use of self-authored videos captured by 16 participants from under-resourced communities. Participants portrayed their mundane life experiences in a form of a video biography. Co-analysis of resulting videos showed that video biographies were used for: authentic representation of daily routines and life stories; portrayal of DIY identities; and promoting living well. Findings show how the self-authored biographies afforded participants a vehicle for challenging cultural stereotypes often associated with the research population. We further demonstrate the value of video-based approaches in user research for illuminating mundane life through rich autobiographical narratives.

New students face challenges when they make the transition from school to university. Existing digital technologies used during this transition can sometimes increase the stressors associated with change. In order to explore ways forward for technology design in this space, we developed a brochure of questionable concepts. The concepts were grounded in findings of our prior research, yet were also intended to act as provocations to promote discussion in workshops involving 32 first year university students. Our analysis of workshop discussions documents the diverse issues students face around social bonding, their home environment, and their academic performance. Our findings challenge assumptions made in prior work about the ease of transition to university. We demonstrate how questionable concepts can play an important role in prompting 'safe' conversations around stressful life events for adolescents.

Smart Donations is a blockchain-based platform that offers users ‘contracts’ that donate funds to certain causes in response to real-world events e.g., whenever an earthquake is detected or an activist tweets about refugees. We designed Smart donations with Oxfam Australia, trialled it for 8-weeks with 86 people, recorded platform analytics and qualitatively analysed questionnaires and interviews about user experiences. Temporal qualities emerge when automation enforces conditions that contributed to participants’ awareness of events that are usually unconscious, and senses of immediacy in contributing to crisis response and ongoing involvement in situations far-away while awaiting conditions to be met. We suggest data driven automation can reveal diverse temporal registers, in real-world phenomena, sociality, morality and everyday life, which contributes to experiencing a ‘right time’ to donate that is not limited to productivity or efficiency. Thus, we recommend a sensitivity to right time in designing for multiple temporalities in FinTech more generally.

Since entering the HCI lexicon in the 1990s, Probes have been interpreted and used in divergent ways as a designerly approach to research. While originally positioned as a critique of dominant user-research methods, literature on Probes rarely reflects on such critical dimensions nor explicitly articulates the intents of using Probes as research artifacts. We conducted interviews with 12 design researchers who have worked with Probes within diverse Research through Design projects, exploring direct accounts of how and why Probes are used in practice. Our interviews brought to the fore the critical concerns behind Probe practices in relation to the language of Probing, relationships with participants, and motivations to challenge normative practices. While the pluralistic interpretations of Probes offered by our participants brings challenges, we discuss how making visible the critical motivations of our research opens up new ways of practicing and disseminating Probes.

Previous HCI research has highlighted opportunities for digital technologies to support outdoor play amongst children. However, the tendency has been to focus on older children and forms of play that are structured and rule-based. We report on a Research-through-Design (RtD) inquiry, grounded in an Embodied Interactional approach, that investigated configurations of off-the-shelf Internet of Things (IoT) tool-kits to inspire new forms of free play outdoors for preschool children. We designed the Lanterns, a tangible interactive resource that is made using household materials and guided by a template, and which explores new possibilities to inspire social play and embodied interaction outdoors. Based on observations of the Lanterns being used by preschool children and Early Years Practitioners outdoors, we identify qualities of free play promoted by the Lanterns outdoors, such as enchantment, improvisation, anticipation and choice. We discuss our findings by defining three sensitising concepts to support future design research in this space: Choosing the Way; Improvising through Movement; Anticipating a Response.

While HCI research has often addressed the needs of older adults, they are often framed as being sceptical of digital technologies. We argue that while many older adults are circumspect users of digital technology, they bring rich and critical perspectives on the role of technology in society that are grounded in lived experiences across their life courses. We report on 20 technology life story interviews conducted with retirees over the age of 60. Our analysis shows how experiences of technology across their life courses significantly undermined participants’ sense of competency, independence, resilience, agency and control. Dissonances between what our participants valued and the perceived values of technology have led them to become critical adopters of technology, and resist its intrusion into certain aspects of their lives. We discuss how the critical perspectives of older adults and the value dissonances they experience are valuable for designing future digital technologies.

It is well documented that people living with mental health conditions are more likely to experience financial difficulties. When explaining this association, emphasis has often been placed on financial capability, i.e. the capacity of those living with poor mental health to manage their money. This paper challenges such capability-based explanations by reporting on a diary study and interviews with 14 people who self-identify as living with a mental health condition. We focused on their experiences of financial technology use, and explored the role technology played in their strategies to minimise the impact of mental health on their economic circumstances. Rather than lacking capability, participants’ practices revealed shortcomings of existing financial technologies and how they sought to work around these. We conclude by providing a set of design directions for technologies that engage those living with poor mental health not as vulnerable targets for financial inclusion, but as full financial citizens.

This pictorial describes in detail the design, and multiple iterations, of PizzaBlock - a role-playing game and design workshop to introduce non-technical participants to decentralised identity management systems. We have so far played this game with six different audiences, with over one hundred participants - iterating the design of the artefacts and gameplay each time. In this pictorial, we reflect on this RtD project to unpack: a) How we designed artefacts and roleplay to explore decentralised technologies and networks; b) How we communicated the key challenges and parameters of a complex system, through the production of a playable, interactive, analogue representation of that technology; c) How we struck a balance between playful tangible gameplay and high-fidelity technical analogy; and d) How approaches like PizzaBlock invite engagement with complex infrastructures and can support more participatory approaches to their design.

We describe a Research-through-Design (RtD) project that explores the Internet of Things (IoT) as a resource for children's free play outdoors. Based on initial insights from a design ethnography, we developed four RtD prototypes for social play in different scenarios of use outdoors, including congregating on a street or in a park to play physical games with IoT. We observed these prototypes in use by children in their free play in two community settings, and report on the qualitative analysis of our fieldwork. Our findings highlight the designs' material qualities that encouraged social and physical play under certain conditions, suggesting social affordances that are central to the success of IoT designs for free play outdoors. We provide directions for future research that addresses the challenges faced when deploying IoT with children, contributing new considerations for interaction design with children in outdoor settings and free play contexts.

Motivated by the effects of the filter bubble and echo chamber phenomena on social media, we developed a smart home device, Spkr, that unpredictably "pushes" socio-political discussion topics into the home. The device utilised trending Twitter discussions, categorised by their socio-political alignment, to present people with a purposefully assorted range of viewpoints. We deployed Spkr in 10 homes for 28 days with a diverse range of participants and interviewed them about their experiences. Our results show that Spkr presents a novel means of combating selective exposure to socio-political issues, providing participants with identifiably diverse viewpoints. Moreover, Spkr acted as a conversational prompt for discussion within the home, initiating collective processes and engaging those who would not often be involved in political discussions. We demonstrate how smart home assistants can be used as a catalyst for provocation by altering and pluralising political discussions within households.

In this paper, we investigate the role of technology to address the concerns of a civil society group carrying out community-level consultation on the allocation of £1 million of community funds. We explore issues of devolved decision-making through the evaluation of a sociodigital system designed to foster deliberative virtues. We describe the ways in which this group used our system in their consultation practices. Our findings highlight how they adopted our technology to privilege specific forms of expression, ascertain issues in their community, make use of and make sense of community data, and create resources for action within their existing practices. Based on related fieldwork we discuss the impacts of structuring and configuring tools for 'talk-based' consultation in order to turn attention to the potential pitfalls and prospects for designing civic technologies that create resources for action for civil society.

This paper explores some of the new possibilities for financial third party access that are enabled by "open banking". The term open banking is used to designate the availability of banks' customer data through application programming interfaces (APIs). Financial third party access refers to the mechanisms that facilitate the engagement of others in the management of our personal finances. Engaging trusted others in personal finances may be especially valuable for individuals experiencing financial hardship or life circumstances that place their financial stability at risk. We deployed a new third party access tool enabled by the UK Open Banking APIs for 90 days with 14 people who self-identified as living with a mental health condition. The tool, which was developed by a financial technology startup founded by the second author, allowed participants to select a trusted "ally" who was notified when certain transactions took place in participants' bank accounts. During the deployment, the 14 participants and 8 of their "allies" took part in a diary study and pre- and post-deployment interviews. The experiences of our participants reveal the inadequacy and shortcomings of existing formal third party access mechanisms, and the moneywork involved in financial third party access. We argue that focusing on this moneywork can help us design flexible, proportionate and practice-sensitive services for financial third party access that move beyond discourses of protection and control in order to enable meaningful financial collaboration.

This pictorial reports on the Play Poles prototype that was designed as part of a design ethnography investigating the Internet of Things (IoT) as a resource supporting outdoor play amongst groups of children. We use illustrations and annotations derived from video data and analysis to depict gestures, actions and social interaction that are significant in understanding the qualities of the Poles as a play resource. We argue that simple functions and direct, real-time control can be used by groups of children to support fun and creativity in outdoor play, whilst also highlighting opportunities and challenges in designing IoT play resources.

This paper presents a qualitative study of the recent integration of a UK-based, digital-first mobile banking app - Monzo - with the web automation service IFTTT (If This Then That). Through analysis of 113 unique IFTTT 'recipes' shared by Monzo users on public community forums, we illustrate the potentially diverse functions of these recipes, and how they are achieved through different kinds of automation. Beyond achieving more convenient and efficient financial management, we note many playful and expressive applications of conditionality and automation that far extend traditional functions of banking applications and infrastructure. We use these findings to map opportunities, challenges and areas of future research in the development of 'programmable money' and related financial technologies. Specifically, we present design implications for the extension of native digital banking applications; novel uses of banking data; the applicability of blockchains and smart contracts; and future forms of financial autonomy.

This paper reports on a co-speculative interview study with charitable donors to explore the future of programmable, conditional and data-driven donations. Responding to the rapid emergence of blockchain-based and AI-supported financial technologies, we specifically examine the potential of automated, third-party 'escrows', where donations are held before they are released or returned based on specified rules and conditions. To explore this we conducted pilot workshops with 9 participants and an interview study in which 14 further participants were asked about their experiences of donating money, and invited to co-speculate on a service for programmable giving. The study elicited how data-driven conditionality and automation could be leveraged to create novel donor experiences, however also illustrated the inherent tensions and challenges involved in giving programmatically. Reflecting on these findings, our paper contributes implications both for the design of programmable aid platforms, and the design of escrow-based financial services in general.

Public commentary related to reality TV can be overwhelmed by thoughtless reactions and negative sentiments, which often problematically reinforce the cultural stereotyping typically employed in such media. We describe the design, and month-long evaluation, of a mobile "second-screening" application, Screenr, which uses co-voting and live textual tagging to encourage more critical co-viewing in these contexts. Our findings highlight how Screenr supported interrogation of the production qualities and claims of shows, promoted critical discourse around the motivations of programmes, and engaged participants in reflecting on their own assumptions and views. We situate our results within the context of existing second-screening co-viewing work, discuss implications for such technologies to support critical engagement with socio-political media, and provide design implications for future digital technologies in this domain.

Recent HCI research has investigated how digital technologies might enable citizens to identify and express matters of civic concern. We extend this work by describing JourneyCam, a smartphone-based system that enables powered wheelchair users to capture video and sensor data about their experiences of mobility. Thirteen participants used JourneyCam to document journeys, after which the data they collected was used to support discussions around their experiences. Our findings highlight how the system facilitated the articulation of complex embodied experiences, and how the collected data might have particular value in surfacing these experiences to help inform urban design and policymaking. Participants valued the ways in which JourneyCam's moving image and sensor data made hard-to-express sensations apparent, as well as how it enabled them to surface previously unrecognised issues. We conclude by highlighting future opportunities for how such tools might enable citizens to inform and influence civic governance.

There is a growing body of literature in HCI examining the intersection between policymaking and technology research. However, what it means to engage in policymaking in our field, or the ways in which evidence from HCI studies is translated into policy, is not well understood. We report on interviews with 11 participants working at the intersection of technology research and policymaking. Analysis of this data highlights how evidence is understood and made sense of in policymaking processes, what forms of evidence are privileged over others, and the work that researchers engage in to meaningfully communicate their work to policymaking audiences. We discuss how our findings pose challenges for certain traditions of research in HCI, yet also open up new policy opportunities for those engaging in more speculative research practices. We conclude by discussing three ways forward that the HCI community can explore to increase engagement with policymaking contexts.

We report on a design-led study in the UK that aimed to understand barriers to children (aged 5 to 14 years) 'playing out' in their neighbourhood and explore the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT) for supporting children's free play that extends outdoors. The study forms a design ethnography, combining observational fieldwork with design prototyping and co-creative activities across four linked workshops, where we used BBC micro:bit devices to co-create new IoT designs with the participating children. Our collective account contributes new insights about the physical and interactive features of micro:bits that shaped play, gameplay, and social interaction in the workshops, illuminating an emerging design space for supporting 'digital playing out' that is grounded in empirical instances. We highlight opportunities for designing for digital playing out in ways that promote social negotiation, supports varying participation, allows for integrating cultural influences, and accounts for the weaving together of placemaking and play.

Recent work within HCI and CSCW has become attentive to the politics of data and metrics in order to highlight the implications of what counts and how. In this paper, we relate these discussions to the longstanding distinctions made between value and values. We introduce literature on 'Valuation Studies' and argue for understanding the politics of data through valuation - an ongoing social practice that transforms socially embedded values into different forms of more abstract value. This theoretical work is developed through an ethnographic study of contemporary UK charity shops, as a site focused on the labour of valuation, but embedded in both local and global values. Through this study, we consider implications for the intervention and design of 'data-driven innovation', with a particular focus on distributed ledger technologies. We argue that these technologies inevitably engage in valuation, and require careful attention to the ongoing processes by which value is translated and performed by different stakeholders.

HCI and CSCW literature has extensively studied a wide variety of maker cultures. In this paper, we focus on understanding what making is like for people and communities who do not have access to advanced technological infrastructures. We report on six-month-long ethnographic fieldwork at a non-profit, resource-constrained, e-waste recycling centre that engages members from a low socioeconomic status (SES) community in making activities. Our findings show that making in such a setting is shaped by local economic and social factors in a resource-constrained environment and highlight how this community engages in a wide range of making activities. In describing these making activities, we emphasize how making was conducted to purposely enable ongoing and future making by others; promoted the wellbeing and skill development of centre members; and was socially-engaged to address concerns in the local community. We conclude by discussing how such type of making contributes a new understanding of maker culture, one that is appreciative of resource-constraints, integrates different sources of value, and is embedded in local place.

This paper examines how data-driven performance monitoring technologies affect the work of telecommunications field engineers. As a mobile workforce, this occupational group rely on an array of smartphone applications to plan, manage and report on their jobs, and to liaise remotely with managers and colleagues. These technologies intend to help field engineers be more productive and have greater control over their work; however they also gather data related to the quantity and effectiveness of their labor. We conducted a qualitative study examining engineers' experiences of these systems. Our findings suggest they simultaneously enhance worker autonomy, support co-ordination with and monitoring of colleagues, but promote anxieties around productivity and the interpretation of data by management. We discuss the implications of data-driven performance management technologies on worker agency, and examine the consequences of such systems in an era of quantified workplaces.

There is a growing interest in HCI research studying technology for citizen engagement in civic issues. We are now seeing issues around technologies for empowerment and participation, long discussed in HCI literature, appropriated and formalised in government legislation. In the UK, recent reforms stipulate that community-based service information should be published in continuously updated, collaboratively designed and maintained, online platforms. We report on a qualitative study where we worked with stakeholders involved in the collaborative design, development and implementation of such a platform. Our findings highlight tensions between the grassroots desire to innovate and local governments' rigid compliance with statutory obligation. We pose a series of challenges and opportunities for HCI researchers engaged in the design of civic technologies to consider going forward, addressing issues of engagement in policy, measures of participation and tools for enabling participatory processes in public institutions.

Blockchain is an emerging infrastructural technology that is proposed to fundamentally transform the ways in which people transact, trust, collaborate, organize and identify themselves. In this paper, we construct a typology of emerging blockchain applications, consider the domains in which they are applied, and identify distinguishing features of this new technology. We argue that there is a unique role for the HCI community in linking the design and application of blockchain technology towards lived experience and the articulation of human values. In particular, we note how the accounting of transactions, a trust in immutable code and algorithms, and the leveraging of distributed crowds and publics around vast interoperable databases all relate to longstanding issues of importance for the field. We conclude by highlighting core conceptual and methodological challenges for HCI researchers beginning to work with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.

HCI draws on a variety of traditions but recently there have been calls to consolidate contributions around the problems researchers set out to solve. However, with this comes the assumption that problems are tractable and certain, rather than constructed and framed by researchers. We take as a case study a Tumblr community of teen shoplifters who post on how to steal from stores, discuss shoplifting as political resistance, and share jokes and stories about the practice. We construct three different "problems" and imagine studies that might result from applying different design approaches: Design Against Crime; Critical Design and Value Sensitive Design. Through these studies we highlight how interpretations of the same data can lead to radically different design responses. We conclude by discussing problem making as a historically and politically contingent process that allow researchers to connect data and design according to certain moral and ethical principles.

Charities are subject to stringent transparency and accountability requirements from government and funders to ensure that they are conducting work and spending money appropriately. Charities are increasingly important to civic life and have unique characteristics as organisations. This provides a rich space in which HCI research may learn from and affect both held notions of transparency and accountability, and the relationships between these organisations and their stakeholders. We conducted ethnographic fieldwork and workshops over a seven month period at a charity. We aimed to understand how the transparency obligations of a charity manifest through work and how the workers of a charity reason about transparency and accountability as an everyday practice. Our findings highlight how organisations engage in presenting different accounts of their work; how workers view their legal transparency obligations in contrast with their accountability to their everyday community; and how their labour does not translate well to outcome measures or metrics. We discuss implications for the design of future systems that support organisations to produce accounts of their work as part of everyday practice.support organisations to produce accounts of their work as part of everyday practice.

While user participation is central to HCI, co-inquiry takes this further by having participants direct and control research from conceptualisation to completion. We describe a co-inquiry, conducted over 16 months with a Parkinson's support group. We explored how the participation of members might be enabled across multiple stages of a research project, from the generation of research questions to the development of a prototype. Participants directed the research into developing alternative modes of information provision, resulting in 'Parkinson's Radio' -- a collectivist health information service produced and edited by members of the support group. We reflect on how we supported participation at different stages of the project and the successes and challenges faced by the team. We contribute insights into the design of collectivist health technologies for this group, and discuss opportunities and tensions for conducting co-inquiry in HCI research.

One of the many challenges of becoming a parent is the shift in one's social life. As HCI researchers have begun to investigate the intersection of sociotechnical system design and parenthood, they have also sought to understand how parents' social lives can be best supported. We build on these strands of research through a qualitative study with new parents regarding the role of digital technologies in their social lives as they transition to parenthood. We demonstrate how sociotechnical systems are entangled in the ways new parents manage their relationships, build (or resist building) new friendships and ad hoc support systems, and navigate the vulnerabilities of parenthood. We discuss how systems designed for new parents can better support the vulnerabilities they internalize, the diverse friendships they desire, and the logistical challenges they experience. We conclude with recommendations for future design and research in this area.

We explore the role of digital media in supporting intergenerational interactions between people with dementia and young people. Though meaningful social interaction is integral to quality of life in dementia, initiating conversation with a person with dementia can be challenging, especially for younger people who may lack knowledge of someone's life history. This can be further compounded without a nuanced understanding of the nature of dementia, along with an unfamiliarity in leading and maintaining conversation. We designed a mobile application - Ticket to Talk - to support intergenerational interactions by encouraging young people to collect media relevant to individuals with dementia to use in conversations with people with dementia. We evaluated Ticket to Talk through trials with two families, a care home, and groups of older people. We highlight difficulties in using technologies such as this as a conversational tool, the value of digital media in supporting intergenerational interactions, and the potential to positively shape people with dementia's agency in social settings.

The emergence of fake news, as well as filter bubbles and echo chambers, has precipitated renewed attention upon the ways in which news is consumed, shared and reflected and commented upon. While online news comments sections offer space for pluralist and critical discussion, studies suggest that this rarely occurs. Motivated by common practices of annotating, defacing and scribbling on physical newspapers, we built a mobile app -- Newsr -- that supports co-annotation, in the form of graffiti, on online news articles, which we evaluated in-the-wild for one month. We report on how the app encouraged participants to reflect upon the act of choosing news stories, whilst promoting exploration, the critique of content, and the exposure of bias within the writing. Our findings highlight how the re-design of interactive online news experiences can facilitate more directed, "in-the-moment" critique of online news stories as well as encourage readers to expand the range of news content they read.

Recent HCI research has highlighted the potential afforded by maker technologies for supporting new forms of DIY Assistive Technology (DIY-AT) for people with disabilities. Furthermore, the popular discourse surrounding both the maker movement and disability is one of democratisation and empowerment. Despite this, critics argue that maker movement membership lacks diversity and that within DIY-AT, it is seldom the people with disabilities who are creating such designs. We conducted a qualitative study that explored how people with disabilities experience the empowering potential of making. We analysed online videos by makers with disabilities and conducted fieldwork at two makerspaces. These informed the design of DIY-Abilities, a series of workshops for people with disabilities in which participants could learn different maker technologies and complete their own maker project. Through analysis of participants' narratives we contribute a new perspective on the specific social and material capacities of accessible maker initiatives.

Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening allergic reaction which is rapid in onset. Adolescents living with anaphylaxis risk often lack the knowledge and skills required to safely manage their condition or talk to friends about it. We designed an educational intervention comprising group discussion around videos of simulated anaphylaxis scenarios and a mobile application containing video-based branching anaphylaxis narratives. We trialed the intervention with 36 nut allergic adolescents. At 1-year follow-up participants had improved adrenaline auto-injector skills and carriage, disease- and age-specific Quality of Life and confidence in anaphylaxis management. At 3-year follow-up adrenaline carriage improved further and confidence remained higher. Participants expressed how the education session was a turning point in taking control of their allergy and how the app facilitated sharing about anaphylaxis with others. We contribute insights regarding design of mobile self-care and peer-support applications for health in adolescence, and discuss strengths and limitations of video-based mobile health interventions.

In this paper we report on a four-month long field trial of ThoughtCloud, a feedback collection platform that allows people to leave ratings and audio or video responses to simple prompts. ThoughtCloud was trialled with four organisations providing care services for people with disabilities. We conducted interviews with staff and volunteers that used ThoughtCloud before, during and after its deployment, and workshops with service users and staff. While the collection of feedback was high, only one organisation regularly reviewed and responded to collected opinions. Furthermore, tensions arose around data access and sharing, and the mismatch of values between "giving voice" and the capacity for staff to engage in feedback practices. We contribute insights into the challenges faced in using novel technologies in resource constrained organisations, and discuss opportunities for designs that give greater agency to service users to engage those that care for them in reflecting and responding to their opinions.

Speculative Enactments are a novel approach to speculative design research with participants. They invite the empirical analysis of participants acting amidst speculative but consequential circumstances. HCI as a broadly pragmatic, experience-centered, and participant-focused field is well placed to innovate methods that invite first-hand interaction and experience with speculative design projects. We discuss three case studies of this approach in practice, based on our own work: Runner Spotters, Metadating and a Quantified Wedding. In distinguishing Speculative Enactments we offer not just practical guidelines, but a set of conceptual resources for researchers and practitioners to critique the different contributions that speculative approaches make to HCI discourse.

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that 'second screening' practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts.

The development of platforms for community decision-making has been of growing interest to the HCI community, yet the ways technology might be woven into traditional consultation processes has been under-studied. We conducted fieldwork at consultation events where residents were invited to discuss and map assets related to their neighbourhoods to inform community decision-making. The fieldwork highlighted problems with equality, turn taking, the evidencing and elaborating on opinions by residents, and challenges related to capturing and documenting the events. We developed Community Conversational-a hybrid table-top game and digital capture and review platform-in response to these issues. Community Conversational was designed to provide a flexible structure to consultation events related to 'place', and support the production, capture and review of deliberative 'talk' to support decision-making. We study how the platform was used in two consultation events, and discuss the implications of capturing and evidencing local people's opinions for the accountability of decision-makers and community organisations.

Care provision in many nations increasingly relies on the work of informal, or non-professional, carers. Often these carers experience substantial disruptions and reductions to their own sociality, weakened social support networks and, ultimately, a heightened risk of social isolation. We describe a qualitative study, comprised of interviews, design workshops and probes, that investigated the social and community support practices of carers. Our findings highlight issues related to becoming and recognising being a carer, and feelings of being ignored by, and isolated from, others. We also note the benefits that sharing between carers can bring, and routes to coping and relaxing from the burdens of care. We conclude with design considerations for facilitating new forms of digitally mediated support that connect those that care, emphasising design qualities related to transitioning, talking, belonging and escaping.

Bots are estimated to account for well over half of all web traffic, yet they remain an understudied topic in HCI. In this paper we present the findings of an analysis of 2284 submissions across three discussion groups dedicated to the request, creation and discussion of bots on Reddit. We set out to examine the qualities and functionalities of bots and the practical and social challenges surrounding their creation and use. Our findings highlight the prevalence of misunderstandings around the capabilities of bots, misalignments in discourse between novices who request and more expert members who create them, and the prevalence of requests that are deemed to be inappropriate for the Reddit community. In discussing our findings, we suggest future directions for the design and development of tools that support more carefully guided and reflective approaches to bot development for novices, and tools to support exploring the consequences of contextually-inappropriate bot ideas.

There is a growing body of research examining the role of technology in supporting the care of--and relationships surrounding--people with dementia, yet little attention has been given to how this relates to younger family members. We conducted a qualitative study based on a series of 6 co-design workshops conducted with 14 young people who had personal experience with dementia. Initially, our workshops focused on understanding the difficulties that young people face when engaging, interacting and being with people with dementia. Initial analysis of workshop data informed the design of three digital tool concepts that were used as the basis for user enactment workshops. Our findings highlight the young people's desire to be more involved in their family discussions around dementia and a need for them to find new ways to connect with their loved ones with dementia. We offer a set of design considerations for future systems that support these needs and reflect on some of the complexities we faced around engaging young people in this difficult topic of discussion.

Current eye tracking technologies have a number of drawbacks when it comes to practical use in real-world settings. Common challenges, such as high levels of daylight, eyewear (e.g. spectacles or contact lenses) and eye make-up, give rise to noise that undermines their utility as a standard component for mobile computing, design, and evaluation. To work around these challenges, we introduce CrowdEyes, a mobile eye tracking solution that utilizes crowdsourcing for increased tracking accuracy and robustness. We present a pupil detection task design for crowd workers together with a study that demonstrates the high-level accuracy of crowdsourced pupil detection in comparison to state-of-the-art pupil detection algorithms. We further demonstrate the utility of our crowdsourced analysis pipeline in a fixation tagging task. In this paper, we validate the accuracy and robustness of harnessing the crowd as both an alternative and complement to automated pupil detection algorithms, and explore the associated costs and quality of our crowdsourcing approach.

In this paper we investigate how online counter-discourse is designed, deployed and orchestrated by activists to challenge dominant narratives around socio-political issues. We focus on activism related to the UK broadcast media’s negative portrayal of welfare benefit claimants; portrayals characterised as “poverty porn” by critics. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore two activist campaigns countering the TV programme Benefits Street . Through content analysis of social media, associated traditional media texts, and interviews with activists, our analysis highlights the way activists leverage the specific technological affordances of different social media and other online platforms in order to manage and configure counter-discourse activities. We reveal how activists use different platforms to carefully control and contest discursive spaces, and the ways in which they utilise both online and offline activities in combination with new and broadcast media to build an audience for their work. We discuss the challenges associated with measuring the success of counter-discourse, and how activists rely on combinations of social media analytics and anecdotal feedback in order to ascertain that their campaigns are successful. We also discuss the often hidden power-relationships in such campaigns, especially where there is ambiguity regarding the grassroots legitimacy of activism, and where effort is placed into controlling and owning the propagation of counter-discourse. We conclude by highlighting a number of areas for further work around the blurred distinctions between corporate advocacy, digilantism and grassroots activism.

In this paper, we reflect upon the ethical dilemmas faced during our research exploring the potential of Google Glass as a self-care technology for people with Parkinson's. Our project involved two stages of research: an initial study that explored the overall acceptability and responses of people with Parkinson's to the technology; and a follow-up study that examined participants’ experiences of the technology in more depth through further trials and a series of co-design activities. While our first trials were successful, leading to publication and subsequent local and national publicity, our follow-up trials were hampered by technical problems that were often out of our control. We highlight how participants’ heightened expectations prior to the second trial, as a result of public discourse around the project, were difficult to meet. This led to our participants articulating their frustrations, feelings of lowered self-confidence, and in some cases a reduced sense of self-worth. We reflect on how the decisions and actions taken during the project led to these dilemmas, and how these relate to contemporary challenges in human-computer interaction research where there is increased focus on in the wild studies of technology use and a pressure to publicly disseminate the findings of research. In doing so, we offer an open and honest account of how a set of ethical dilemmas emerged while conducting technology field trials with a potentially vulnerable group, and offer guidance to future researchers finding themselves in similar circumstances. We conducted ‘in the wild’ deployments of Google Glass with people with Parkinson's. There were several ethical implications of conducting this type of research, wherein the technology in question was still being developed and updated by its commercial manufacturer. Prior publicity about our project caused participants to formulate overly positive preconceptions around the technology. We reflect in detail on some of the decisions and actions taken during the project, and discuss strategies for researchers to take into account in future studies that might help anticipate, avoid and negotiate ethical dilemmas in the future.

ThoughtCloud is a lightweight, situated, digital feedback system designed to allow voluntary and community sector care organisations to gather feedback and opinions from those who use their services. In this paper we describe the design and development of ThoughtCloud and its evaluation through a series of deployments with two organisations. Using the system, organisations were able to pose questions about the activities that they provide and gather data in the form of ratings, video or audio messages. We conducted observations of ThoughtCloud in use, analysed feedback received, and conducted interviews with those who 'commissioned' feedback around the value of comments received about their organisation. Our findings highlight how simple, easily deployable digital systems can support new feedback processes within care organisations and provide opportunities for understanding the personal journeys and experiences of vulnerable individuals who use these care services.

We introduce Metadating -- a future-focused research and speed-dating event where single participants were invited to "explore the romance of personal data". Participants created "data profiles" about themselves, and used these to "date" other participants. In the rich context of dating, we study how personal data is used conversationally to communicate and illustrate identity. We note the manner in which participants carefully curated their profiles, expressing ambiguity before detail, illustration before accuracy. Our findings proposition a set of data services and features, each concerned with representing and curating data in new ways, beyond a focus on purely rational or analytic relationships with a quantified self. Through this, we build on emerging interest in "lived informatics" and raise questions about the experience and social reality of a "data-driven life".

In recent years there has been an increased focus upon developing platforms for community decision-making, and an awareness of the importance of handing over civic platforms to community organisations to oversee the process of decision-making at a local level. In this paper, we detail fieldwork from working with two community organisations who used our distributed situated devices as part of consultation processes. We focus on some of the mundane and often-untold aspects of this type of work: how questions for consultations were formed, how locations for devices were determined, and the ways in which the data collected fed into decision-making processes. We highlight a number of challenges for HCI and civic technology research going forward, related to the role of the researcher, the messiness of decision making in communities, and the ability of community organisations to influence how citizens participate in democratic processes.

Increasingly, governments and organisations publish data on expenditure and finance as 'open' data in order to be more transparent to the public in how funding is spent. Accountable is a web-based tool that visualises and relates open financial data provided by local government and non-profit organisations (NPOs) in the UK. A qualitative study was conducted where Accountable was treated as a technology probe, and used by representatives of NPOs and members of the public who invest their time or effort voluntarily into such organisations. The study highlighted how: current open data sets provided by public bodies are inadequate in their representation of funding structures; the focus on finance and fiscal expenditure in such data makes invisible the in-kind effort of volunteers and the wider beneficiaries of an organisation's work; and problems arising from the interoperability of open data technologies. The paper concludes with implications for the design of future systems, considering the domains of transparency and accountability in relation to the findings.

We present Speeching, a mobile application that uses crowdsourcing to support the self-monitoring and management of speech and voice issues for people with Parkinson's (PwP). The application allows participants to audio record short voice tasks, which are then rated and assessed by crowd workers. Speeching then feeds these results back to provide users with examples of how they were perceived by listeners unconnected to them (thus not used to their speech patterns). We conducted our study in two phases. First we assessed the feasibility of utilising the crowd to provide ratings of speech and voice that are comparable to those of experts. We then conducted a trial to evaluate how the provision of feedback, using Speeching, was valued by PwP. Our study highlights how applications like Speeching open up new opportunities for self-monitoring in digital health and wellbeing, and provide a means for those without regular access to clinical assessment services to practice and get meaningful feedback on their speech.

Digital technologies offer the possibility of community empowerment via the reconfiguration of public services. This potential relies on actively involved citizens engaging with decision makers to pursue civic goals. In this paper we study one such group of involved citizens, examining the evidencing practices of a rare disease charity campaigning for accessible public transport. Through fieldwork and interviews, we highlight the ways in which staff and volunteers assembled and presented different forms of evidence, in doing so reframing what is conceived as 'valid knowledge'. We note the challenges this group faced in capturing experiential knowledge around the accessibility barriers of public transport, and the trade-offs that are made when presenting evidence to policy and decision makers. We offer a number of design considerations for future HCI research, focusing on how digital technology might be configured more appropriately to support campaigning around the politics of mobility.

This paper presents an empirical investigation of how people appropriated Twitter for socio-political talk in response to a television (TV) portrayal of people supported by state welfare and benefits. Our findings reveal how online discussion during, and in-between, TV broadcasts was characterised by distinctly different qualities, topics and user behaviours. These findings offer design opportunities for social media services to (i) support more balanced real-time commentaries of politically-charged media, (ii) actively promote discussion to continue after, and between, programming; and (iii) incorporate different motivations and attitudes towards socio-political concerns, as well as different practices of communicating those concerns. We contribute to the developing HCI literature on how social media intersects with political and civic engagement and specifically highlight the ways in which Twitter interacts with other forms of media as a site of everyday socio-political talk and debate.

Reduced vocal volume in Parkinson's is extremely common and can have significant social and emotional impact. We describe the development and evaluation of LApp--an application for Google Glass to help people with Parkinson's (PwP) monitor their speech volume and cue themselves to speak louder when necessary. Our findings highlight enthusiasm for using the application both at home as a volume training tool and in public social settings as a situated cueing device. We contribute insights to the literature on how eyewear technologies can provide assistance to people with health conditions and offer insights for the design of future self-monitoring and management applications on Google Glass.

Most Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers are accustomed to the process of formal ethics review for their evaluation or field trial protocol. Although this process varies by country, the underlying principles are universal. While this process is often a formality, for field research or lab-based studies with vulnerable users, formal ethics requirements can be challenging to navigate -- a common occurrence in the social sciences; yet, in many cases, foreign to HCI researchers. Nevertheless, with the increase in new areas of research such as mobile technologies for marginalized populations or assistive technologies, this is a current reality. In this paper we present our experiences and challenges in conducting several studies that evaluate interactive systems in difficult settings, from the perspective of the ethics process. Based on these, we draft recommendations for mitigating the effect of such challenges to the ethical conduct of research. We then issue a call for interaction researchers, together with policy makers, to refine existing ethics guidelines and protocols in order to more accurately capture the particularities of such field-based evaluations, qualitative studies, challenging lab-based evaluations, and ethnographic observations.

This paper examines how London bus drivers have responded to performance monitoring via a telematics device called Drivewell. This device calculates a score based on various recordable driving-related events like abrupt braking or irregular turning actions. Our qualitative methodology incorporated semi-structured interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, in order to explore drivers' attitudes towards the system and its effect on driving behaviour and working conditions. Our findings illustrate how bus operators simultaneously accommodate and resist the demands Drivewell places upon them. Our work also demonstrates how this digital intervention acts in conjunction with other driver-related technologies, creating a unique digital ecosystem on the modern London bus. Our research contributes to HCI understandings of digital surveillance and performance monitoring in the modern workplace.

As digital payments become increasingly important features of economic exchange, traditional forms of payment such as cash are becoming phased out in certain settings. We study one such context-the elimination of cash payment on London buses in July 2014. We conducted ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with drivers and collected online and social media comments before, during and shortly after the introduction of cashless fares. We explore how drivers and passengers were fearful of the change due in part to a lack of information and communication, the anticipation of negative effects on vulnerable passengers and a compromise in freedom, flexibility and surveillance. We highlight the ways cashless payments can alter the social function of money, create new forms of work for drivers and passengers, and if not carefully introduced can cause emotional stress and fears of state surveillance and control.

Health and care providers are increasingly looking to online and peer-to-peer services to supplement existing channels of assistive living technology (ALTs) provision and assessment. We describe the findings from 12 co-design workshops with 28 people from the UK representing a range of older people with and without health conditions, users of ALT and carers for people using such devices. The workshops were conducted to explore issues related to finding reliable information about ALT with the goal of gathering requirements for the design of a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing platform. Our analysis highlights how a current reliance on peers and informal networks relates to a desire to establish the authenticity and relatability of another person's experience to one's own circumstances. This connects to a perceived mistrust in information where provenance and authenticity is not clear. We use these to critique the wisdom of taking an e-marketplace and recommendation service approach to ALT provision and assessment, and offer alternatives based on our findings.

Ageing has become a significant area of interest in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in recent years. In this article we provide a critical analysis of 30 years of ageing research published across the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) community. Discourse analysis of the content of 644 archival papers highlights how ageing is typically framed as a “problem” that can be managed by technology. We highlight how ageing is typically defined through an emphasis on the economic and societal impact of health and care needs of older people, concerns around socialisation as people age, and declines in abilities and associated reductions in performance when using technology. We draw from research within the fields of social and critical gerontology to highlight how these discourses in SIGCHI literature represent common stereotypes around old age that have also prevailed in the wider literature in gerontology. We conclude by proposing strategies for future research at the intersection of ageing and HCI.

We consider the role of making in current HCI design practices and how it may affect the wellbeing of those who participate in these processes. Through an exploration of psychological concepts of wellbeing and their connection to making experiences, we suggest that making can facilitate and support both hedonic and eudemonic facets of wellbeing. We illustrate this in the context of three case studies that engaged people in creative making activities as part of user-centered design processes. Based on our experiences, we argue that researchers ought to be mindful of the potential impact our design processes have on our participants and provide considerations for those designing for and with participants where wellbeing is a concern.

We describe a qualitative study investigating the acceptability of the Google Glass eyewear computer to people with Parkinson's disease (PD). We held a workshop with 5 PD patients and 2 carers exploring perceptions of Glass. This was followed by 5-day field trials of Glass with 4 PD patients, where participants wore the device during everyday activities at home and in public. We report generally positive responses to Glass as a device to instil confidence and safety for this potentially vulnerable group. We also raise concerns related to the potential for Glass to reaffirm dependency on others and stigmatise wearers.

This paper examines how an occupational group has adapted to the demands of working with a Location Based Service (LBS). Instead of following a rigid timetable, London's bus drivers are now required to maintain an equal distance between the bus in front and the one behind. Our qualitative study employs ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth semi-structured interviews to elicit drivers' perspectives of the new system and show how it has modified their driving and general work conditions. We explore how passengers influence the movement of the bus and how the technology frames bus drivers' relationships to their managers and commuters. This work contributes to our understanding of the impact of LBS in the workplace and shows how technological imperatives can be established that cause unanticipated consequences and gradually undermine human relationships.

While theatre has been used in HCI as a tool for engaging participants in design processes, the specific benefits of using live theatre over other communicative mediums, remains underexplored. In this paper we introduce Experience Design Theatre (EDT) as an approach to undertaking experience-centered design with multiple parties in the early stages of design. EDT was motivated by a need to involve several diverse groups of people in the design of a digitally coordinated care service - NetCarers. We used live theatre as a way to engage small groups of participants in dialogues around the design of NetCarers, to qualify their contributions in a refined performance, and to communicate their concerns and aspirations to domain experts. We highlight key benefits to using live theatre in experience-centered design and offer insights for researchers undertaking similar work in the future.

This paper reports on a qualitative study of 38 low-income individuals living in the North East of England. The participants' experiences of money, banking and the role digital technology plays in their financial practices were identified through semi-structured interviews in people's homes and group workshops. A grounded theory analysis of these data characterises how technology both helped and hindered participants to keep close control of their finances. These findings suggest design opportunities for future digital banking technologies that extend the already sophisticated practices of individuals managing a low income, focusing on: delaying, prioritising, planning, watching, and hiding monetary transactions.

We detail the design of the Department of Hidden Stories (DoHS), a mobile-based game to support playful digital storytelling among primary school children in public libraries. Through a process of iterative design in collaboration with library staff and children's writers we designed DoHS to support the potential for playful storytelling through interactions with books. A deployment of DoHS with two classes of 8 to 10 years olds as part of their regular library visits revealed insights related to how to balance the expectations of a child-at-play and the requirement to further develop their creative reading and writing skills. Based on our experiences we recommend that designers create playful digitally based activities that encourage children to explore libraries and experience new interactions with physical books.

We describe a qualitative study of delegate engagement with technology in academic conferences through a large-scale deployment of prototype technologies. These deployments represent current themes in conference technologies, such as providing access to content and opportunities for socialising between delegates. We consider not just the use of individual technologies, but also the overall impact of an assemblage of interfaces, ranging from ambient to interactive and mobile to situated. Based on a two-week deployment followed by interviews and surveys of attendees, we discuss the ways in which delegates engaged with the prototypes and the implications this had for their experience of the conferences. From our findings, we draw three new themes to inform the development of future conference technologies.

The joint study of computer security, privacy and human-computer interaction (HCI) over the last two decades has shaped a research agenda focused upon usable privacy & security. However, in HCI research more generally there has long been an awareness of the need to understand and design for user experience, in recognition of the complex and multi-faceted role that technology now plays in our lives. In this paper we add to the growing discussion by introducing the notion of experience-centered privacy and security. We argue that in order to engage users of technology around issues related to experiences of privacy and security, research methods are required that may be outside of the normal repertoire of methods that we typically call upon. We describe three projects that developed non-typical research methods to reveal experiential insights into user interactions with privacy and security-related technologies. We conclude by proposing a research agenda that begins to illustrate how the discourse and methods of experience-centered design might serve to provide valuable alternative perspectives on new and enduring user-facing privacy and security problems.

Delegation is the practice of sharing authority with another individual to enable them to complete a specific task as a proxy. Practices to permit delegation can range from formal to informal arrangements and can involve spontaneous yet finely balanced notions of trust between people. This paper argues that delegation is a ubiquitous yet an unsupported feature of socio-technical computer systems and that this lack of support illustrates a particular neglect to the everyday financial practices of the more vulnerable people in society. Our contribution is to provide a first exploration of the domain of person-to-person delegation in digital payments, a particularly pressing context. We first report qualitative data collected across several studies concerning banking practices of individuals over 80 years of age. We then use analytical techniques centred upon identification of stakeholders, their concerns and interactions, to characterize the delegation practices we observed. We propose a Concerns Matrix as a suitable representation to capture conflicts in the needs of individuals in such complex socio-technical systems, and finally propose a putative design response in the form of a Helper Card.

Trigger Shift was a project that involved collaborating with a group of young people to explore the ways commercially available technologies could be appropriated into performance art. The project led to the production of an augmented theatrical performance using the Microsoft Kinect sensor that was presented to live audiences six times over two days. In this paper we describe the bottom-up, 11-month long participatory design process conducted with our young participants. We describe the manner in which the project was introduced to our participants and the techniques used to help them actively make decisions about the design of and role of technology in the final performance. We candidly report on the problems encountered during the design process and how the project team had to be reflexive to the needs of participants and the single predefined end-goal of the project. A number of strengths and weaknesses of bottom-up participatory design with young people are highlighted, and we reflect upon these to provide guidance for future researchers undertaking work in this domain.

We describe findings from a 15-month ethnography of hip-hop performers in Cape Town, South Africa. Mobile communications and social media are hugely important to the development of these performers' careers, opening access to collaborators, production tools, audiences and distribution channels. This group go to extraordinary lengths to gain and maintain access to these technologies, often by exploiting their social capital through musical and ethnic networks. We document that even after nearly twenty years of democracy, a ridged separation along racial lines persists, which can be seen in all areas of life including access to and proficiency in digital technologies. We illustrate how hip-hop performers harness these divisions both on and offline in order to distinguish themselves from other artists. Our research raises a number of implications for post-colonial computing, highlighting difficulties related to discontinuous access, and how international preconceptions of identity and authenticity emerge as a consequence of the increased use of communication technology.

The term 'participation' is traditionally used in HCI to describe the involvement of users and stakeholders in design processes, with a pretext of distributing control to participants to shape their technological future. In this paper we ask whether these values can hold up in practice, particularly as participation takes on new meanings and incorporates new perspectives. We argue that much HCI research leans towards configuring participation. In exploring this claim we explore three questions that we consider important for understanding how HCI configures participation; Who initiates, directs and benefits from user participation in design? In what forms does user participation occur? How is control shared with users in design? In answering these questions we consider the conceptual, ethical and pragmatic problems this raises for current participatory HCI research. Finally, we offer directions for future work explicitly dealing with the configuration of participation.

HCI researchers working in publically funded institutions are increasingly encouraged to engage the public in their research. Mass media is often seen as an effective medium with which to communicate research to large parts of the population. We present an account of three HCI projects that have used engagements with mass media in order to communicate research to the public. We describe the motivations for working with mass media and the mechanics of writing press releases. A grounded theory analysis of online public responses to the projects in the mass media leads us to identify a number of concerns about how research is portrayed by news outlets and thus interpreted by the public. Tensions about technologies and wider societal issues were revealed that might normally be hidden when using traditional user-centred methods. We critically reflect on the efficacy of using the mass media in research and provide guidance for HCI researchers wishing to engage in dialogues with the public in the future.

Supporting independent living for the ageing population in later life is an often-cited application area for ubiquitous computing. Telecare services such as remote monitoring systems are now coming onto the consumer market but there is little knowledge of the impact these technologies may have on relationships between family members and older relatives. We present findings from a live field trial of SHel--a telecare system that allows nominated caregivers to remotely monitor activities--in 17 older adult's homes. Interviews were conducted with the 17 older participants and 11 of their nominated caregivers before, during and after using the system. We establish that such technologies transform existing hidden care routines between family members into care work, and the impact they have upon the sense of independence and privacy of those who are being monitored in their home.

Invisible Design is a technique for generating insights and ideas with workshop participants in the early stages of concept development. It involves the creation of ambiguous films in which characters discuss a technology that is not directly shown. The technique builds on previous work in HCI on scenarios, persona, theatre, film and ambiguity. The Invisible Design approach is illustrated with three examples from unrelated projects; Biometric Daemon, Panini and Smart Money. The paper presents a qualitative analysis of data from a series of workshops where these Invisible Designs were discussed. The analysis outlines responses to the films in terms of; existing problems, concerns with imagined technologies and design speculation. It is argued that Invisible Design can help to create a space for critical and creative dialogue during participatory concept development.

This workshop brings together a cross-disciplinary community of researchers and practitioners interested in participative practice and interactive systems design. The workshop addresses growing fascination with participation across interaction design, community informatics, the arts, science and social science, and asks workshop participants to reflect on the ethics and efficacy of the tools and methods used in these diverse practices. The aim of the workshop will be to map out a critical framework exploring the qualities of participation from multiple disciplines. The workshop outcomes will outline how cross-disciplinary perspectives on participation can contribute to participatory and user-centred interaction design.

This paper describes a project exploring the design of digital payment services in collaboration with 16 people aged over 80. Many older people find cheques valuable as a means of payment but the UK Payments Council recently proposed their abolition. We describe two designs that simultaneously aimed to preserve and augment the paper cheque as a means of making electronic payments. These were devised during participatory design workshops through critical dialogues with our eighty something participants. Workshop discussions resulted in the creation of a real world cheque system where we issued pre-paid cheques without the involvement of banks. This work informed the development of a digital cheque book based on Anoto digital pen technology. The work illustrates the value of participatory design with 'extraordinary' users, such as the eighty somethings, in HCI.

This paper reports findings from a series of participatory design workshops with ten people over eighty years old. The focus of the workshops was new banking technologies for the older old. Participants were asked to discuss their current experiences of banking and given packs of concept cards which contained design sketches and brief outlines of concepts for new financial services. The designs on the cards were deliberately provocative and aimed to encourage criticism and debate. Participants wrote and drew on the cards and the workshops were recorded and transcribed. The participants were extremely critical of current banking practices and most of the new concepts we presented to them. Their questions and comments led to a number of insights and further iterations. The paper argues that critique is an essential resource for design, both in terms of identifying problems and iterating ideas.

A cheque is a paper document that orders the transfer of money between bank accounts. Whilst an eighty-year-old in the UK is predicted on average to live at least another ten years, cheques may not. Despite many older peoples extensive use of cheques, UK banks are eager to abolish them and design electronic alternatives that are less costly to process and less vulnerable to fraud. This paper reports on two qualitative studies that explored the banking experiences of 23 people over eighty years old. Cheques support financial collaboration with others in ways that digital payment systems do not. We argue that whilst it might be possible to improve the design of digital payment systems to better support financial collaboration, the case for retaining and enhancing cheques is stronger. Rather than replace cheques, we must design ways of making them less costly to process and better linked to electronic payment methods.