Our everyday technologies could have appeared terrifying to our ancestors: instantaneous disembodied communication, access to knowledge, objects with ‘intelligence’ that talk to us (and each other). Black boxes and intangible entities are omnipresent in our homes and lives without our necessarily understanding the hidden flows of data, unknown agendas, imaginary clouds, and mysterious rules that govern them. Have humanity's ways of relating to the unknown throughout history gone away, or have they perhaps transmuted into new forms? In an ongoing project, we have inventoried examples, encounters and reflections on contemporary technology, framed through the perspective of the haunted, spectral and otherworldly. In this paper, we excerpt this collection to illustrate the value and opportunity of an unfamiliar, disquieting perspective in helping to frame the frictions, beliefs and myths that are emerging around interactions with everyday technologies. We posit and demonstrate ‘spooky technology’ as an accessible framework to reflect and respond to our increasingly entangled relationships with technology.

The word “robot” frequently conjures unrealistic expectations of utilitarian perfection: tireless, efficient and flawless agents. However, real-world robots are far from perfect—they fail and make mistakes. Thus, roboticists should consider altering their current assumptions and cultivating new perspectives that account for a more complete range of robot roles, behaviors, and interactions. To encourage this, we explore the use of metaphors for generating novel ideas and reframing existing problems, eliciting new perspectives of human-robot interaction. Our work makes two contributions. We (1) surface current assumptions that accompany the term “robots,” and (2) present a collection of alternative perspectives of interaction with robots through metaphors. By identifying assumptions, we provide a comprehensible list of aspects to reconsider regarding robots’ physicality, roles, and behaviors. Through metaphors, we propose new ways of examining how we can use, relate to, and co-exist with the robots that will share our future.

Autoethnographic and other first-person research methods are a topic of increasing interest in design and HCI. This focus parallels the boom in self-tracking and personal informatics, perhaps most intriguingly in the intersection of quantitative and qualitative data and the noticing of patterns in one's own life and everyday wellbeing. But how can design support this? One opportunity is for research probes, or tools, which enable forms of self-inquiry, by design researchers themselves, or others. In this paper-with the broad scope of healthier student sleep as a domain-we present a series of artifacts designed by undergraduates as tools to enable autoethnographic exploration, and detail how they have been used to investigate bedtime routines, personal scheduling of time, focus, sleep data, and sleeping in non-traditional places. We also reflect on the notion of combination autoethnographic 'kits' as a way forward for forms of self-inquiry.

There is much work in the CHI community about the 'industry-academia divide', and how to bridge it. One key crossover between HCI/UX scientists and practitioners is the development and use of tools and methods-boundary objects between academia and practice. Among other forms of collaboration, there is an underdeveloped opportunity for academics to make use of industry events (conferences, meetups, design jams) as a research venue in the context of tool and method development. This paper describes three cases from work in academia-industry engagement over the last decade, in which workshops or experiments have been run at industry events as a way of trialling and developing tools directly with practitioners. We discuss advantages of this approach and extract key insights and practical implications, highlighting how the CHI community might use this method more widely, gathering relevant research outcomes while contributing to knowledge exchange between academia and practice.

Metaphors are important at multiple levels within design and society-from the specifics of interfaces, to wider societal imaginaries of technology and progress. Exploring alternative metaphors can be generative in creative processes, and for reframing problems strategically. In this pictorial we introduce an inspiration card workshop method using juxtaposition (or bisociation) to enable participants to explore novel metaphors for hard-to-visualise phenomena, drawing on a provisional set of inspiration material. We demonstrate the process through illustrating creative workshops in France, Portugal, Chile, and the USA, and reflect on benefits, limitations, and potential development of this format for use within interaction design.

In this paper we introduce the concept of Phone as an Emotive AI sidekick through a set of novel interactions where in a multi-axis actuated robotic charging stand we made acts as a 'body' for the AI on our phones. The novel interactions begin with how the robotic platform embodies and thus communicates our devices' understanding of the world, continues with the affordance for more varied expressive output, and works towards extending current phone functionality to be far-field, context-driven interactions.

As we move toward commercial usage of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, it is important to think about how computing should communicate with us when it is distributed in our environment. This paper proposes that qualitative indexical visualizations based on learned understanding of physical phenomena (Experiential Augmentation) can enhance our interaction design language and aid digital interfaces in communicating in a real-world context. We present a study that gathers data on how participants interpret such visualizations, and propose a model with which to analyze their responses. Finally, we also give a set of design recommendations for those interested in creating similar augmentations.

Printerface proposes a visual design technique to create customized and interactive icons that may be applied to paper or textile substrates. The icons are screen printed electroluminescent (EL) and conductive inks. Research in the field of printed electronics traditionally uses either dot-matrix or multiple capacitive buttons for interaction. Current low-resolution interfaces limit customizability and user interaction. The Printerface demo suggest a new method which allows a designer visual freedom over low-resolution displays.

Persuasive Technology has the potential to influence user behavior for social benefit, e.g. to reduce environmental impact, but designers are lacking guidance choosing among design techniques for influencing interaction.