As autonomous vehicles enter public spaces, external human–machine interfaces are proposed to support communication with external road users. A decade of research has produced hundreds of studies and reviews, yet it remains unclear whether the field is converging on shared principles or diverging across approaches. We present a multi-dimensional analysis of 620 publications, complemented by industry deployments and regulatory documents, to track research evolution and identify convergence. The analysis reveals several field-level patterns. First, convergence on a safety-first core: simple visual cues that clarify intent. Second, sustained divergence in necessity and implementation. Third, a progressive filtering funnel: broad exploration in research and concepts narrows in deployment and is codified by regulation into a minimal set of permitted signals. These insights point to a shift in emphasis for future work, from producing new prototypes toward consolidating evidence, clarifying points of contention, and developing frameworks that can adapt across contexts.

Urban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.

Autonomous mobility systems increasingly operate in environments shared with animals, from urban pets to wildlife.However, their design has largely focused on human interaction, with limited understanding of how non-human species perceive, respond to, or are affected by these systems.Motivated by research in Animal-Computer Interaction (ACI) and more-than-human design, this study investigates animal interactions with autonomous mobility through a multi-method approach combining a scoping review (45 articles), online ethnography (39 YouTube videos and 11 Reddit discussions), and expert interviews (8 participants).Our analysis surfaces five key areas of concern: Physical Impact (e.g., collisions, failures to detect), Behavioural Effects (e.g., avoidance, stress), Accessibility Concerns (particularly for service animals), Ethics and Regulations, and Urban Disturbance.We conclude with design and policy directions aimed at supporting multispecies coexistence in the age of autonomous systems.This work underscores the importance of incorporating non-human perspectives to ensure safer, more inclusive futures for all species.

Uncertainty inherently exists in the autonomous decision-making process of robots. Involving humans in resolving this uncertainty not only helps robots mitigate it but is also crucial for improving human-robot interactions. However, in public urban spaces filled with unpredictability, robots often face heightened uncertainty without direct human collaborators. This study investigates how robots can engage bystanders for assistance in public spaces when encountering uncertainty and examines how these interactions impact bystanders' perceptions and attitudes towards robots. We designed and tested a speculative `peephole' concept that engages bystanders in resolving urban robot uncertainty. Our design is guided by considerations of non-intrusiveness and eliciting initiative in an implicit manner, considering bystanders' unique role as non-obligated participants in relation to urban robots. Drawing from field study findings, we highlight the potential of involving bystanders to mitigate urban robots' technological imperfections to both address operational challenges and foster public acceptance of urban robots. Furthermore, we offer design implications to encourage bystanders' involvement in mitigating the imperfections.

Virtual reality (VR) has been increasingly utilised as a simulation tool for human-robot interaction (HRI) studies due to its ability to facilitate fast and flexible prototyping. Despite efforts to achieve high validity in VR studies, haptic sensation, an essential sensory modality for perception and a critical factor in enhancing VR realism, is often absent from these experiments. Studying an interactive robot help-seeking scenario, we used a VR simulation with haptic gloves that provide highly realistic tactile and force feedback to examine the effects of haptic sensation on VR-based HRI. We compared participants’ sense of presence and their assessments of the robot to a traditional setup using hand controllers. Our results indicate that haptic sensation enhanced participants’ social and self-presence in VR and fostered more diverse and natural bodily engagement. Additionally, haptic sensations significantly influenced participants’ affective-related perceptions of the robot. Our study provides insights to guide HRI researchers in building VR-based simulations that better align with their study contexts and objectives.

Abstract Enhancing transparency in automated vehicle (AV) behaviour can help pedestrians understand how AVs work, which builds trust and ensures safer interactions. As AVs increasingly operate as part of a coordinated network, it is important to make their connectivity clear, helping pedestrians anticipate AV behaviour on the road. This study uses a qualitative design exploration to investigate visual methods for conveying AV connectivity. In the first phase, design concepts were generated using a biomimicry approach, drawing inspiration from nature, such as the harmonious chirping of crickets. In the second phase, focus groups with 16 participants were conducted to gather new concept ideas and evaluate the biomimicry-inspired designs. Our findings suggest that network symbols (e.g., Wi-Fi signals) or graphical elements resembling these symbols (e.g., ripple waves) are more effective in communicating connectivity than abstract methods, such as light patterns moving in a coordinated manner across vehicles. Highly visible connectivity cues may enhance pedestrians' perceived safety, a promising area for future research. This research contributes to ongoing efforts in designing intuitive visual communication strategies for AVs, moving beyond intent communication to include how AVs function as a network.

Abstract Autonomous vehicles (AVs) tend to disrupt the atmosphere and pedestrian experience in urban shared spaces, undermining the focus of these spaces on people and placemaking. We investigate how external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs) supporting AV-pedestrian interaction can be extended to consider the characteristics of an urban shared space. Inspired by urban HCI, we devised three place-based eHMI designs that (i) enhance a conventional intent eHMI and (ii) exhibit content and physical integration with the space. In an evaluation study, 25 participants experienced the eHMIs in an immersive simulation of the space via virtual reality and shared their impressions through think-aloud, interviews, and questionnaires. Results showed that the place-based eHMIs had a notable effect on influencing the perception of AV interaction, including aspects like visual aesthetics and sense of reassurance, and on fostering a sense of place, such as social interactivity and the intentionality to coexist. In measuring qualities of pedestrian experience, we found that perceived safety significantly correlated with user experience and affect, including the attractiveness of eHMIs and feelings of pleasantness. The paper opens the avenue for exploring how eHMIs may contribute to the placemaking goals of pedestrian-centric spaces and improve the experience of people encountering AVs within these environments.

Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess challenges distinct from traditional human-robot collaboration, requiring design investigation and tailored interaction strategies. This study investigates playful help-seeking as a strategy to encourage such bystander assistance. We compared our designed playful help-seeking concepts against two existing robot help-seeking strategies: verbal speech and emotional expression. To assess these strategies and their impact on bystanders’ experience and attitudes towards urban robots, we conducted a virtual reality evaluation study with 24 participants. Playful help-seeking enhanced people’s willingness to help robots, a tendency more pronounced in scenarios requiring greater physical effort. Verbal help-seeking was perceived less polite, raising stronger discomfort assessments. Emotional expression help-seeking elicited empathy while leading to lower cognitive trust. The triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results highlights considerations for robot help-seeking from bystanders.

As intelligent agents transition from controlled to uncontrolled environments, they face challenges that sometimes exceed their operational capabilities. In many scenarios, they rely on assistance from bystanders to overcome those challenges. Using robots that get stuck in urban settings as an example, we investigate how agents can prompt bystanders into providing assistance. We conducted four focus group sessions with 17 participants that involved bodystorming, where participants assumed the role of robots and bystander pedestrians in role-playing activities. Generating insights from both assumed robot and bystander perspectives, we were able to identify potential non-verbal help-seeking strategies (i.e., addressing bystanders, cueing intentions, and displaying emotions) and factors shaping the assistive behaviours of bystanders. Drawing on these findings, we offer design considerations for help-seeking urban robots and other agents operating in uncontrolled environments to foster casual collaboration, encompass expressiveness, align with agent social categories, and curate appropriate incentives.

Policymakers advocate for the use of external Human-Machine Interfaces (eHMIs) to allow autonomous vehicles (AVs) to communicate their intentions or status. Nonetheless, scalability concerns in complex traffic scenarios arise, such as potentially increasing pedestrian cognitive load or conveying contradictory signals. Building upon precursory works, our study explores ‘interconnected eHMIs,’ where multiple AV interfaces are interconnected to provide pedestrians with clear and unified information. In a virtual reality study (N=32), we assessed the effectiveness of this concept in improving pedestrian safety and their crossing experience. We compared these results against two conditions: no eHMIs and unconnected eHMIs. Results indicated interconnected eHMIs enhanced safety feelings and encouraged cautious crossings. However, certain design elements, such as the use of the colour red, led to confusion and discomfort. Prior knowledge slightly influenced perceptions of interconnected eHMIs, underscoring the need for refined user education. We conclude with practical implications and future eHMI design research directions.

This paper describes a mixed-methods usability study of seven diverse Self-Service Technologies (SSTs). SSTs mediate many of our everyday interactions with individuals, businesses, and government organizations. Parking meters, transport ticket machines, electric vehicle recharge points, and fast-food ordering kiosks are all likely familiar examples of this category of technology, promising convenient access to products and services. Despite their ubiquity, many SSTs suffer from severe usability issues, the nature of which have not been explored to date by the HCI community. This study evaluates the interactions between users and a broad sample of SSTs, details the usability issues that occurred, explores their connections and consequences, and presents a set of design considerations that may lead to their remediation.

The deployment of autonomous delivery robots in urban environments presents unique challenges in navigating complex traffic conditions and interacting with diverse road and sidewalk users. Effective communication between robots and road and sidewalk users is crucial to address these challenges. This study investigates real-world encounter scenarios where delivery robots and road and sidewalk users interact, seeking to understand the essential role of communication in ensuring seamless encounters. Following an online ethnography approach, we collected 117 user-generated videos from TikTok and their associated 2,067 comments. Our systematic analysis revealed several design opportunities to augment communication between delivery robots and road and sidewalk users, which include facilitating multi-party path negotiation, managing unexpected robot behaviour via transparency information, and expressing robot limitations to request human assistance. Moreover, the triangulation of video and comments analysis provides a set of design considerations to realise these opportunities. The findings contribute to understanding the operational context of delivery robots and offer insights for designing interactions with road and sidewalk users, facilitating their integration into urban spaces.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) may use external interfaces, such as LED light bands, to communicate with pedestrians safely and intuitively. While previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of these interfaces in simple traffic scenarios involving one pedestrian and one vehicle, their performance in more complex scenarios with multiple road users remains unclear. The scalability of AV external communication has therefore attracted increasing attention, prompting the need for further investigation. This scoping review synthesises information from 54 papers to identify seven key scalability issues in multi-vehicle and multi-pedestrian environments, with Clarity of Recipients, Information Overload, and Multi-Lane Safety emerging as the most pressing concerns. To guide future research in scalable AV-pedestrian interactions, we propose high-level design directions focused on three communication loci: vehicle, infrastructure, and pedestrian. Our work contributes the groundwork and a roadmap for designing simplified, coordinated, and targeted external AV communication, ultimately improving safety and efficiency in complex traffic scenarios.

As mobile robots enter shared urban spaces, operating in close proximity to people, this raises new challenges in terms of how these robots communicate with passers-by. Following an iterative process involving expert focus groups (n=8), we designed an augmented reality concept that visualises the robot's navigation intent and the pedestrian's predicted path. To understand the impact of path visualisations on trust, sense of agency, user experience, and robot understandability, we conducted a virtual reality evaluation (n=20). We compared visualising both robot intent and pedestrian path prediction against just visualising robot intent and a baseline without augmentation. The presence of path visualisations resulted in a significant improvement of trust. Triangulation of quantitative and qualitative results further highlights the impact of pedestrian path prediction visualisation on robot understandability as it allows for exploratory interaction.

The ability of autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact socially with pedestrians poses a significant impact on their integration with urban traffic. This is particularly important for vehicle-pedestrian shared spaces due to increased social requirements in comparison to vehicular roads. Current pedestrian experience in shared spaces suffers from negative attitudes towards AVs and the consequently low acceptability of AVs in these spaces. HRI work shows that the acceptability of robots in public spaces can be positively impacted by their perceived sociability (i.e., possessing social skills), which can be enhanced by their ability to express emotions. Inspired by this approach, we follow a systematic process to design emotional expressions for AVs using the headlight ("eye'') area and investigate their impact on perceived sociability of AVs in shared spaces, by conducting expert focus groups (N=12) and an online video-based user study (N=106). Our findings confirm that the perceived sociability of AVs can be enhanced by emotional expressions indicated through emotional eyes. We further discuss implications of our findings for improving pedestrian experience and attitude in shared spaces and highlight opportunities to use AVs' emotional expressions as a new external communication strategy for future research.

In this paper, we investigate how to elicit new perspectives in research-through-design (RtD) studies through annotated portfolios. Situating the usage in human-robot interaction (HRI), we used two robotic artefacts as a case study: we first created our own annotated portfolio and subsequently ran online workshops during which we asked HRI experts to annotate our robotic artefacts. We report on the different aspects revealed about the value, use, and further improvements of the robotic artefacts through using the annotated portfolio technique ourselves versus using it with experts. We suggest that annotated portfolios – when performed by external experts – allow design researchers to obtain a form of creative and generative peer critique. Our paper offers methodological considerations for conducting expert annotation sessions. Further, we discuss the use of annotated portfolios to unveil designerly HRI knowledge in RtD studies.

The rise of autonomous systems in cities, such as automated vehicles (AVs), requires new approaches for prototyping and evaluating how people interact with those systems through context-based user interfaces, such as external human-machine interfaces (eHMIs). In this paper, we present a comparative study of three prototype representations (real-world VR, computer-generated VR, real-world video) of an eHMI in a mixed-methods study with 42 participants. Quantitative results show that while the real-world VR representation results in higher sense of presence, no significant differences in user experience and trust towards the AV itself were found. However, interview data shows that participants focused on different experiential and perceptual aspects in each of the prototype representations. These differences are linked to spatial awareness and perceived realism of the AV behaviour and its context, affecting in turn how participants assess trust and the eHMI. The paper offers guidelines for prototyping and evaluating context-based interfaces through simulations.

The nascent field of biodesign creates novel applications of life sciences through design methods. Biodesign has the potential to shift interactive computational systems from using purely digital components to systems that integrate living organisms. However, there is a lack of understanding of biodesign and how it advances HCI. We present a review of 41 papers published in ACM Digital Library, IEEE Explore digital library and the Design and Applied Arts Index. We found that existing literature describes aspects of biodesign theory, design processes and artifacts, and educational environments, but not holistically. Based on the findings, we define biodesign as the application of the bioaffordances of an organism. We contribute the Bio-Inquiry model: a methodology connecting user-centered, scientific and critical inquiries to inform the design of interactive artifacts. We discuss the opportunities at the intersection of biodesign and HCI to consider the nature of future technologies.

An increasing number of studies employ virtual reality (VR) to evaluate interactions between autonomous vehicles (AVs) and pedestrians. VR simulators are valued for their cost-effectiveness, flexibility in developing various traffic scenarios, safe conduct of user studies, and acceptable ecological validity. Reviewing the literature between 2010 and 2020, we found 31 empirical studies using VR as a testing apparatus for both implicit and explicit communication. By performing a systematic analysis, we identified current coverage of critical use cases, obtained a comprehensive account of factors influencing pedestrian behavior in simulated traffic scenarios, and assessed evaluation measures. Based on the findings, we present a set of recommendations for implementing VR pedestrian simulators and propose directions for future research.

HCI researchers have begun to more systematically study non-digital transient approaches for displaying information in public space, for example, in the form of chalk infographics. These approaches provide several benefits compared to digital displays, such as: ad-hoc deployment, barrier-free interaction, and being more sustainable. However, one limitation is their hyperlocal scale and impact. Speculating on urban robots as agents for scaling up physicalised displays, we describe the exploratory design and deployment of Woodie, a slow-moving robot that draws on the ground using conventional chalk sticks. We deployed Woodie for three weeks in a quiet laneway situated within a highly urbanised area. Data collected from observations, video logs and interviews revealed that Woodie successfully attracted people's attention and acted as a facilitator for collaborative, creative placemaking. Furthermore, Woodie provoked emotional responses and was perceived as a living being. Findings are interpreted to describe opportunities urban robots provide for the design of future pervasive urban displays.

Public interactive displays (PID) are a promising technology for providing information and collecting feedback in public spaces. Research on PIDs has shown that, like all public displays, their efficacy is reduced by display blindness. Rather than increase the visual attention-grabbing nature of PIDs, we propose that additional understanding is required around how and when these displays are able to offer value to users. We tackle this through a systematic analysis of PID studies published in the literature, which led to 9 aspects of value across 4 factors: people, location, community, and time. We discuss the identified aspects and their utility for the design of PIDs through a review of our own deployments carried out by 4 different labs across 5 countries. We conclude with a set of recommendations for identifying and optimising the intended value of future PIDs.

Recent studies have investigated new approaches for communicating an autonomous vehicle's (AV) intent and awareness to pedestrians. This paper adds to this body of work by presenting the design and evaluation of in-situ projections on the road. Our design combines common traffic light patterns with aesthetic visual elements. We describe the iterative design process and the prototyping methods used in each stage. The final design concept was represented as a virtual reality simulation and evaluated with 18 participants in four different street crossing scenarios, which included three scenarios that simulated various degrees of system errors. We found that different design elements were able to support participants' confidence in their decision even when the AV failed to correctly detect their presence. We also identified elements in our design that needed to be more clearly communicated. Based on these findings, the paper presents a series of design recommendations for projection-based communication between AVs and pedestrians.

Brainstorming is an important part of creative design, related to exploring the associativity of different ideas and the combination of their parts. Previous work has investigated social interactions, productivity, techniques, and quality of brainstorming activities. The paper contributes to this body of work by studying the design affordances of brainstorming toolkits, and the relationship between idea associations and brainstorming. We examined 21 brainstorming toolkits designed for creative brainstorming within the context of game design, which led us to four tiers of design affordances that specify the supportive qualities of toolkits for brainstorming. To gain further insights into the use of tools, we surveyed game jams participants about their brainstorming activities and the use of tools at Global Game Jam 2017. We found a large number of participants using traditional stationery to aid brainstorming and a common usage of mind mapping and rearranging post-it notes. These findings inform our discussion of how idea creation is leveraged by a hybrid use of traditional and digital tools.

Low-resolution (low-res) lighting displays are increasingly used by HCI researchers, designers, and in the industry as a versatile and aesthetic medium for deploying ambient interfaces in various contexts. These display types distinguish themselves from conventional high-res screens through: high contrasts, hi-power LED technology which allows visibility even in bright environments, and their ability to take on three-dimensional free forms. However, to date most work on low-res displays has been either of experimental nature or carried out in isolated industry contexts. This paper addresses this gap through an analysis of our own experiences from previous experimental design studies and related work, which led us to five domain challenges for designing low-res displays. We then describe how we approached these challenges in a deployment study, which involved the implementation of a prototype guided by a low-res prototyping toolkit. Based on an analysis of our design process and findings from the deployment study, we present ten design recommendations for low-res lighting displays.

The Urban Heat Island Effect (UHI) is a phenomenon whereby cities tend to be hotter than suburbs. We frame the UHI as a "wicked problem" that poses a range of economic, healthcare, and social challenges. Our paper examines how different stakeholders negotiate complex value systems, collect data, and rely on collaborative platforms to address the problem of urban heat. Using documentary filmmaking as a research method, we conducted ethnographically-oriented interviews with participants including vulnerable communities, urban architects, microclimate researchers, and grassroots activists. Our findings reveal that unlike problems that can be solved using traditional HCI paradigms of distributed work, the UHI presents an entanglement of challenges that do not necessarily converge on a single solution. We conclude by discussing two opportunities for addressing wicked problems through social computing: knowledge systems for sharing hybrid data across domains and interactive forums for discourse among diverse actors.

Low-resolution lighting displays are commonplace in internet-of-things devices, wearable products and embedded interfaces. However, prototyping such displays is challenging and cumbersome as methods, specific domain knowledge and skills are only available to experts. In this paper we present a novel toolkit to assist with designing and evaluating the characteristics of low-resolution lighting displays as well as content variations using different materials. We describe the components of the toolkit, which include a tablet, a custom-built app and low-cost prototyping materials, and its use within the context of a design study. The toolkit can easily be replicated and adopted by others working in this domain to prototype low-resolution lighting displays without requiring any previous expertise in hardware prototyping.

Mid-air gestures offer a promising way to interact with large public displays. User representations are important to attract people to such displays, convey interactivity and provide meaningful gesture feedback. We evaluated two forms of user representation, an abstract skeleton and a silhouette, at a large public information display. Results from 56 days, with 190 sessions involving 483 detected people, indicate the silhouette attracted more passers-by to interact and, of these, more engaged in serious browsing interactions. By contrast, the skeleton representation had more playful interactions. Our work contributes to the understanding of the implications of these choices of user representation.

Single display interactive groupware interfaces have the potential to effectively support small group work in classrooms. Our work aimed to gain understanding needed to realize that potential. First, we wanted to study how learners use these large interactive displays, compared with a more traditional method within classrooms . Second, we wanted to fill gaps in the current understanding of the effectiveness of interactive tables versus walls . Third, we wanted to do this out of the laboratory setting, in authentic classrooms , with their associated constraints. We conducted an in-the-wild study, with 51 design students, working in 14 groups, learning the brainstorming technique. Each group practiced brainstorming in three classrooms: one with vertical displays (walls); another with multi-touch tabletops; and the third with pens and index cards. The published literature suggested that tabletops would be better than the other conditions for key factors of cooperative participation, mutual awareness, maintaining interest and affective measures. Contrary to this, we found that the horizontal and vertical displays both had similar levels of benefit over the conventional method. It was only for affective measures that tabletops were better than walls. All conditions were similar for our several measures of outcome quality. We discuss the implications of our findings for designing future classrooms.

This paper describes the design and evaluation of our Media Ribbon, a large public interactive display for browsing hierarchical information, with mid-air gestures. Browsing a hierarchical information space is a fundamental form of interaction. Designing learnable mid-air gestures is a current challenge for large display interaction. Our in-the-wild evaluation draws on 41 days of quantitative log data, with 4484 gestures detected, and qualitative data from 15 interviews, and associated video. We explored: whether our design enabled people to learn the gestures; how our tutorial and feedback mechanisms supported learning; and the effectiveness of support for browsing hierarchical information. Our contributions are: (1) design of large public display for browsing of hierarchical information; (2) with its gesture set; (3) insights into the ways people learn and use this interface in our context; and (4) guidelines for designing learnable mid-air gestures.

Characterised by the increased spread of technology out of workplaces and into public spaces and homes, the so-called third-wave of human-computer interaction has placed greater focus on scenarios that are socially situated, context dependent and not necessarily task oriented. This movement has led to studies investigating how people interact with digital applications in public spaces, but the discussion of intuitive interaction thus far has not been extended to this new realm of user interfaces. Designing for intuitive interaction in public spaces differs from traditional digital applications due to the inherently fluid social nature and often large-scale character of urban interventions. This article discusses the design of interaction for public spaces, based on applications we developed along the years, contrasted to similar endeavours elsewhere. We analyse them through the lens of frameworks for intuitive interactions and derive a series of strategies towards designing for immediate use and high crowd turnaround in urban interventions.

In this paper we describe the design of a large-scale interactive light and music intervention on a corporate high rise building and its surrounding urban area. Designing for interaction with media façades has traditionally posed challenges regarding proxemics, scale of the augmented architecture and placement of interactive spaces. With the increasing availability and affordability of interactive technologies, factors such as playability and tangibility are assumed not only to be present but also to enable richer collective experiences. We propose a new approach for interaction with large media façades employing embodied audio-visual interaction at the floor level. That way, the floor level serves as proxy for interacting with the media façade whilst facilitating social encounters. We discuss aspects considered during different phases of the project development and derive principles for connecting zones of proxemics, promoting encounters by distributing the performance, designing for urban activation and isolating implementation concerns.

According to Google Trends, mobile augmented reality (AR) apps will, after a brief hype-associated peak and decline, show again a more steady growth in the near future. Indeed, a review of currently available mobile AR apps suggests that they are embracing practical uses instead of simply showing off the capabilities of AR. Many of these apps are making information more ubiquitous without making the user necessarily aware of the data's origins, using graphics to represent multiple datasets. There has been however little research focusing on the trends in AR and the types of data visualisations used in mobile AR. The purpose of this paper is to fill that void by presenting an analysis of currently popular mobile AR apps on the market. Our findings from this small-scale investigation give an indication of the types of visualisation styles used in current mobile AR apps and highlight suggestions for how to make the information presented more relevant, for example by using better filtering methods.

Public displays and projections are becoming increasingly available in various informal urban settings. However, their potential impact on informing and engaging citizens on relevant issues has still been largely unexplored. In this paper, we show that visualizations displayed in public settings are able to increase social awareness and discourse by exposing underlying patterns in data that is submitted by citizens. We thus introduce the design and evaluation of Reveal-it!, a public, interactive projection that facilitates the comparison of the energy consumptions of individuals and communities. Our in-the-wild deployment in three distinct physical locations provided insights into: 1) how people responded to this form of display in different contexts; 2) how it influenced people's perception and discussion of individual and communal data; and 3) the implications for a public visualization as a tool for increasing awareness and discourse. We conclude by discussing emerging participant behaviors, as well as some challenges involved in facilitating a socially motivated crowd-sourced visualization in the public context.

This paper reports on a between-subject, comparative online study of three information visualization demonstrators that each displayed the same dataset by way of an identical scatterplot technique, yet were different in style in terms of visual and interactive embellishment. We validated stylistic adherence and integrity through a separate experiment in which a small cohort of participants assigned our three demonstrators to predefined groups of stylistic examples, after which they described the styles with their own words. From the online study, we discovered significant differences in how participants execute specific interaction operations, and the types of insights that followed from them. However, in spite of significant differences in apparent usability, enjoyability and usefulness between the style demonstrators, no variation was found on the self-reported depth, expert-rated depth, confidence or difficulty of the resulting insights. Three different methods of insight analysis have been applied, revealing how style impacts the creation of insights, ranging from higher-level pattern seeking to a more reflective and interpretative engagement with content, which is what underlies the patterns. As this study only forms the first step in determining how the impact of style in information visualization could be best evaluated, we propose several guidelines and tips on how to gather, compare and categorize insights through an online evaluation study, particularly in terms of analyzing the concise, yet wide variety of insights and observations in a trustworthy and reproducable manner.

This study investigates the impact of revealing the changes in daily residential energy consumption of individual households on their respective house faç ades. While energy feedback devices are now commercially available, still little is known about the potential of making such private information publicly available in order to encourage various forms of social involvement, such as peer pressure or healthy competition. This paper reports on the design rationale of a custom-made chalkboard that conveys different visualizations of household energy consumption, which were updated daily by hand. An in-situ, between-subject study was conducted during which the effects of such a public display were compared with two different control groups over a total period of 7 weeks. The competitive aspects of the public display led to more sustained behavior change and more effective energy conservation, as some graphical depictions such as a historical line graph raised awareness about consumption behavior, and the public character of the display prompted discussions in the wider community. The paper concludes with several considerations for the design of public displays, and of household energy consumption in particular.

In this paper we describe an approach for preserving personal information, stored on pervasive devices, using a reliable platform. Nowadays, pervasive devices such as mobile phones or personal multimedia players, provide software and hardware capabilities that allow individuals to read and create digital contents. Therefore it is important to provide the ability to archive these contents for later retrieval and use on other platforms. To address this need we introduce an archiving framework and present a working prototype based on this framework. The prototype runs on the Android operating system and enables individuals to archive their pervasive device information for long-term preservation.

In this paper we present results from contextual interviews and observations, which we conducted in Tanzania over a period of six weeks. In our interviews we focused on use cases and benefits that the mobile phone introduced in these areas. Specifically we were interested in the impact of mobile ICTs on social networks in general and communication with friends and family in particular. The goal of the study was to identify potential areas where ICTs could improve people's lives. Based on an analysis of the results from this study we created personas, which describe archetype mobile phone users and their respective needs and goals. The paper concludes with a number of directions for further research in this area.

In this paper we suggest the ceiling as a new physical surface for information visualization. To provide a design framework for application designers, we present the notion of 'information sky'. This concept is based on (1) the metaphor of the natural sky, (2) historical examples of ceiling art and (3) recent computing paradigms, including mediatecture, ubiquitous computing and ambient display. We further introduce three distinct categories that denote potential application domains for ceiling-based data visualizations. Finally, we present four different application scenarios we have developed using prototyping and user-centered design techniques, and discuss how they relate to the categories.

This poster describes the design and early evaluation of MusicPets. MusicPets allows children to store audio, such as (composed) tunes or recorded messages, on tangible containers embodied by soft toys. Results show that children enjoy creating tunes and appreciate the possibility to record them on physical objects so that they can later 'show' them to others. They would also use MusicPets for exchanging messages and playing DJ using multiple prerecorded soft toys. MusicPets not only fosters musical creativity but also promotes collaboration among children.