Gastrointestinal sounds are a constant part of human physiology, offering potential insights into digestive functions and everyday bodily awareness. However, these sounds are rarely noticed and often socially stigmatised, remaining underexplored in HCI despite calls to recognise the gut as a site for embodied awareness. We extend HCI’s engagement with involuntary biosignals by positioning gut sounds as a uniquely generative context for interoceptive interaction design, where systems can scaffold awareness, reflection, and care. We conducted a week-long in-the-wild qualitative study with ten participants, which showed how making gut sounds audible reshaped bodily awareness, provoked affective responses, and prompted acts of reflection and tinkering. From these insights, we contribute four bodily perspectives – Registering, Reacting, Reflecting, and Responding- that capture the oscillatory nature of interoceptive engagement and offer design strategies that position biosignals as sites of curiosity, care, and awareness that are socially situated.

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is increasingly integrated into photo applications on personal devices, making editing photographs easier than ever while potentially influencing the memories they represent. This study explores how and why people use GenAI to edit personal photos and how this shapes their remembering experience. We conducted a two-phase qualitative study with 12 participants: a photo editing session using a GenAI tool guided by the Remembering Experience (RX) dimensions, followed by semi-structured interviews where participants reflected on the editing process and results. Findings show that participants prioritised felt memory over factual accuracy. For different photo elements, environments were modified easily, however, editing was deemed unacceptable if it touched upon a person's identity. Editing processes brought positive and negative impacts, and itself also became a remembering experience. We further discuss potential benefits and risks of GenAI editing for remembering purposes and propose design implications for responsible GenAI.

Queer young men (similar to others in the LGBTQ+ community) depend heavily on social platforms but their use can often be problematic. Their needs are often not adequately considered in the design of general platforms and they can be exposed to intra-community harms on LGBTQ+ specific platforms such as dating apps. To explore how social platform design could be improved to better support the needs of queer young men, we conducted a co-design study. We recruited 13 queer men working in technology design to generate new concepts for social platform features. We then refined these concepts and evaluated them in group sessions with end users, a different cohort of 15 queer young men. Here we present mockups of the concepts and findings from evaluations. Our findings show specific ways that providing more agency to social platform users could improve their experiences and we discuss implications for design.

Traditional games like "Tag" rely on shared control via inter-body interactions (IBIs) – touching, pushing, and pulling – that foster emotional and social connection. Digital games largely limit IBIs, with players using their bodies as input to control virtual avatars instead. Our “Shared Bodily Fusion” approach addresses this by fusing players’ bodies through a mediating computer, creating a shared input and output system. We demonstrate this approach with "Hidden Touch", a game where a novel social electrical muscle stimulation system transforms touch (input) into muscle actuations (output), facilitating IBIs. Through a study (n=27), we identified three player experience themes. Informed by these findings and our design process, we mapped their trajectories across our three experiential spaces – threshold, tolerance, and precision – which collectively form our design framework. This framework facilitates the creation of future digital games where IBIs are intrinsic, ultimately promoting the many benefits of social play.

The field of Sports Human-Computer Interaction (SportsHCI) investigates interaction design to support a physically active human being. Despite growing interest and dissemination of SportsHCI literature over the past years, many publications still focus on solving specific problems in a given sport. We believe in the benefit of generating fundamental knowledge for SportsHCI more broadly to advance the field as a whole. To achieve this, we aim to identify the grand challenges in SportsHCI, which can help researchers and practitioners in developing a future research agenda. Hence, this paper presents a set of grand challenges identified in a five-day workshop with 22 experts who have previously researched, designed, and deployed SportsHCI systems. Addressing these challenges will drive transformative advancements in SportsHCI, fostering better athlete performance, athlete-coach relationships, spectator engagement, but also immersive experiences for recreational sports or exercise motivation, and ultimately, improve human well-being.

Experts emphasise that maintaining a healthy gut microbial balance requires the public to understand factors beyond diet, such as physical activity, lifestyle, and other real-world influences. Games as experiential systems are known to foster playful engagement and reflection. We propose a novel approach to promoting activity engagement for gut health and its reflection through the design of the Go-Go Biome game. The game simulates the interplay between friendly and unfriendly gut microbes, encouraging real-world activity engagement for gut-microbial balance through interactive visuals, unstructured play mechanics, and reflective design principles. A field study with 14 participants revealed that important facets of our game design led to awareness, playful visualisation, and reflection on factors influencing gut health. Our findings suggest four design lenses– bio-temporality, visceral conversations, wellness comparison, and inner discovery, to aid future playful design explorations to foster gut health engagement and reflection.

Prior research around the design of interactive systems has highlighted the benefits of supporting embodiment in everyday life. This resulted in the creation of body-centric systems that leverage movement. However, these advances supporting movement in everyday life, aligning with the embodiment theory, so far focused on sensing movement as opposed to facilitating movement. We present PneuMa, a novel wearable system that can facilitate movement in everyday life through pneumatic-based bodily extensions. We showcase the system through three examples: "Pardon?", moving the ear forward; "Greetings", moving a hand towards the "Bye-bye" gesture; "Take a break", moving the hands away from the keyboard, enabling the bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. From the thematic analysis of a field study with 12 participants, we identified three themes: bodily awareness, Perception of the scenarios, and anticipating movement. We discuss our findings in relation to prior research around bodily extensions and embodied interaction to provide strategies to design bodily extensions that support movement in everyday life. Ultimately, we hope that our work helps more people profit from the benefits of everyday movement support.

Our bodies play an important part in our remembering practices, for example when we can remember passwords by typing, even if we cannot verbalise them. An increasing number of technologies are being developed to support remembering. However, so far, they seem to have not taken the opportunity yet to support remembering through bodily movements. To better understand how to design for such embodied remembering, we conducted a diary study with 12 participants who recorded their embodied remembering experiences in everyday life over a three-week period. Our thematic analysis of the diaries and interviews led to the creation of a framework that helps understand embodied remembering experiences (ERXs) based on the level of skilled and conscious movements used. We describe how this ERX framework could help with the design of technologies to support embodied remembering.

Most digital bodily games focus on the body as they use movement as input. However, they also draw the player’s focus away from the body as the output occurs on visual displays, creating a divide between the physical body and the virtual world. We propose a novel approach – the "Body as a Play Material" – where a player uses their body as both input and output to unify the physical body and the virtual world. To showcase this approach, we designed three games where a player uses one of their hands (input) to play against the other hand (output) by loaning control over its movements to an Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) system. We conducted a thematic analysis on the data obtained from a field study with 12 participants to articulate four player experience themes. We discuss our results about how participants appreciated the engagement with the variety of bodily movements for play and the ambiguity of using their body as a play material. Ultimately, our work aims to unify the physical body and the virtual world.

Spectating digital games can be exciting. However, due to its vicarious nature, spectators often wish to engage in the gameplay beyond just watching and cheering. To blur the boundaries between spectators and players, we propose a novel approach called "Fused Spectatorship", where spectators watch their hands play games by loaning bodily control to a computational Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) system. To showcase this concept, we designed three games where spectators loan control over both their hands to the EMS system and watch them play these competitive and collaborative games. A study with 12 participants suggested that participants could not distinguish if they were watching their hands play, or if they were playing the games themselves. We used our results to articulate four spectator experience themes and four fused spectator types, the behaviours they elicited and offer one design consideration to support each of these behaviours. We also discuss the ethical design considerations of our approach to help game designers create future fused spectatorship experiences.

Our gastrointestinal health is influenced by complex interactions between our gut bacteria and multiple external factors. A wider understanding of these concepts is vital to help make gut-friendly decisions in everyday life; however, its complexity can challenge public understanding if not approached systematically. Research suggests that board games can help to playfully navigate complex subjects. We present Gooey Gut Trail (GGT), a board game to help players understand the multifactorial interactions that influence and sustain gut microbial diversity. Through the embodied enactment of in-game activities, players learn how their habits surrounding diet, physical activity, emotions, and lifestyle influence the gut microbial population. A qualitative field study with 15 participants revealed important facets of our game design that increased participants' awareness, causing them to reflect upon their habits that influence gut health. Drawing upon the study insights, we present five design considerations to aid future playful explorations on nurturing human-microbial relationships.

Teachers are increasingly being encouraged to embrace evidence-based practices. Learning analytics (LA) offer great promise in supporting these by providing evidence for teachers and learners to make informed decisions and transform the educational experience. However, LA limitations and their uptake by educators are coming under critical scrutiny. This is in part due to the lack of involvement of teachers and learners in the design of LA tools. In this paper, we propose a human-centred approach to generate understanding of teachers' data needs through the lens of three key principles of translucence: visibility, awareness and accountability. We illustrate our approach through a participatory design sprint to identify how teachers talk about classroom data. We describe teachers' perspectives on the evidence they need for making better-informed decisions and discuss the implications of our approach for the design of human-centred LA in the next years.

Reflection is of increasing interest in HCI as it has many potential benefits in design, education and everyday life. In this paper, we explore media-supported reflection through the design and deployment of three concepts. In contrast to prevalent reflective approaches that are based on system-collected data, we explore how user-created media can support personal reflection. Three interactive prototypes were developed, focusing on different modalities: Balance uses audio, Cogito uses text, and Dott uses visual media. We evaluate these concepts in an in-thewild study that is both explorative and comparative. We found that the open-ended systems primarily supported reflection during the creation of media and that the use depended on opportunity and triggers. We conclude the paper with a discussion of our findings regarding the method and the implications of our findings for the broader area of design for reflection.

Technological products have become central to the ways in which many people communicate with others, conduct business and spend their leisure time. Despite their prevalence and significance in people's lives, these devices are often perceived to be highly replaceable. From a sustainability perspective, there is value in creating technological products with meaning directly associated with their materiality to reduce the rate of product consumption. We set out to explore the potential for design to promote the formation of product attachment by creating technological devices with meaningful materiality, closely integrating the physical form with the significance of its digital contents. We used the life stories and ongoing input of our intended user as inspiration for the creation of Melo, a bespoke music player. The evaluation and critical reflection of our design process and resulting artefact are used to propose a design strategy for promoting product attachment within the growing sector of technological devices.

Personal photo collections have grown due to digital photography and the introduction of smartphones, and photo collections have become harder to manage. Deleting photos appears to be difficult and the task of curation is often perceived as not enjoyable. The lack of curation can make it harder to retrieve photos when people need them for various reasons, such as individual reminiscing, shared remembering or self-presentation. In this study we investigate how we can stimulate people to organise their photo collections on their smartphones. Ten participants evaluated and qualitatively compared four applications with different characteristics regarding voting on and deleting photos. We found that voting on photos is easier and more enjoyable in comparison to deleting photos, that participants showed reminiscence while organising, that deleting can be frustrating, that participants have different preferences for sorting and viewing photos and that voting could make deleting and retrieving easier.

Devices such as phones, laptops and tablets have become central to the ways in which many people communicate with others, conduct business and spend their leisure time. This type of product uniquely contains both physical and digital components that affect how they are perceived and valued by users. This article investigates the nature of attachment in the context of technological possessions to better understand ways in which designers can create devices that are meaningful and kept for longer. Findings from our study of the self-reported associations and meaningfulness of technological possessions revealed that the digital contents of these possessions were often the primary source of meaning. Technological possessions were frequently perceived as systems of products rather than as singular devices. We identified several design opportunities for materialising the associations ascribed to the digital information contained within technological products to more meaningfully integrate their physical and digital components.

There is an increasing interest in the HCI research community to design richer user interactions with the Internet of Things (IoT). This studio will allow exploring the design of tangible interaction with the IoT, what we call Internet of Tangibles. In particular, we aim at investigating the full interaction-attention continuum, with the purpose of designing IoT tangible interfaces that can switch between peripheral interactions that do not disrupt everyday routines, and focused interactions that support user's reflections. This investigation will be conducted through hands-on activities where participants will prototype tangible IoT objects, starting by a paper prototyping phase, supported by design cards, and followed by an Arduino prototype phase. The purpose of the studio is also establishing a community of researchers and practitioners, from both academy and industry, interested in the field of tangible interaction with the Internet of Things.

Romantic relationships are often facilitated through digital technologies, such as social networking sites and communication services. They are also facilitated through "digital possessions", such as messages sent to mobile devices and photos shared through social media. When individuals break up, digitally disconnecting can be facilitated by using those digital technologies and managing or curating these digital possessions. This research explores the break up stories of 13 individuals aged between 18 and 52. The aim of this work is to inform the design of systems focused on supporting individuals to decouple and disentangle digitally in the wake of a break up. Four areas of interest emerged from the data: communication, using digital possessions, managing digital possessions, and experiences of technology. Opportunities for design were identified in decoupling and disentangling, and designing around guilt.

To investigate the phenomenon that occurs during interactions between used objects and autobiographical memories, which are both ever-changing and imbedded with personal significance, an adapted probing method capable of managing these complex qualities is needed. This pictorial is our attempt to find a nuanced indication of how probes could go beyond common usage to facilitate complex felt experience, and how probes can be used in less prescriptive ways to instead promote reminiscent dialogues that are rich and open to interpretation for both participants and researchers. It illustrates our exploration into potential Memory Probes and how this might be done that reflects the value we see in creating restrictions or limitations in technology-mediated interactions to encourage active participation by users in social acts such as memory creation and remembrance.

Since the widespread adoption of digital photography, people create many digital photos, often with the intention to use them for shared remembering. Practices around digital photography have changed along with advances in media sharing technologies such as smartphones, social media, and mobile connectivity. Although much research was done at the start of digital photography, commercially available tools for media-supported shared remembering still have many limitations. The objective of our research is to explore spatial and material design directions to better support the use of personal photos for collocated shared remembering. In this paper, we present seven design requirements that resulted from a redesign workshop with fifteen participants, and four design concepts (two spatial, two material) that we developed based on those requirements. By reflecting on the requirements and designs we conclude with challenges for interaction designers to support collocated remembering practices.

Reflection in and on everyday life can provide self-insight, increase gratitude and have a positive effect on well-being. To integrate reflection in everyday life, media technologies can provide support. In this paper, we explore how both media creation & use in different modalities can support reflection. We present the ongoing work of designing and building Balance, Cogito, and Dott, focusing on media in audible, textual and visual form. We discuss our research-through-design process and address the differences between modalities in terms of interaction, tangibility, and the integration in everyday life.

Reminders are designed to support remembering actions or intentions to be performed later in time. Most technologies that have a reminding functionality do so by asking attention (e.g., by using auditory alerts or vibration patterns) from users at a certain point in time or location. Because of their obtrusive nature, the reminders of many (digital) prospective memory aids we use on a daily basis are hard to ignore, regardless of our ability and motivation to perform the reminded action or intention. In this paper, we present Wobble: an interactive cone-shaped artefact for reminding in the home environment. Wobble was designed to investigate peripheral reminders. Our results imply that wobble is best suitable for reminding intentions that do not require direct action but can be carried out over a period of time, which is a type of reminding currently not met by most electronic memory aids.

People accumulate large collections of digital photos, which they use for individual, social, and utilitarian purposes. In order to provide suitable technologies for enjoying our expanding photo collections, it is essential to understand how and to what purpose these collections are used. Contextual interviews with 12 participants in their homes explored the use of digital photos, incorporating new photo activities that are offered by new technologies. Based on the qualitative analysis of the collected data, we give an overview of current photo activities, which we term PhotoUse. We introduce a model of PhotoUse, which emphasises the purpose of photo activities rather than the tools to support them. We argue for the use of our model to design tools to support the user’s individual and social goals pertaining to PhotoUse.

Designing to support memory for older individuals is a complex challenge in human-computer interaction (HCI) research. Past literature on human memory has mapped processes for recalling past experiences, learning new things, remembering to carry out future intentions and the importance of attention. However, the understanding of how older adults perceive forgetting in daily life remains limited. This paper narrows this gap through a study with older persons (n=18) living independently using self-reporting and semi-structured focus groups to explore what they forget, how they react, and what mechanisms they put in place to recover from and avoid forgetting. Findings include occurrences of prospective and retrospective memory lapses, conflicting negative and neutral perceptions, and techniques to manage forgetting. Participant responses indicate that an awareness of forgetting fosters internal tensions among older adults, thereby creating opportunities for further design research, e.g., to defuse and normalise these reactions.

Reflection gives insight, supports action and can improve wellbeing. People might want to reflect more often for these benefits, but find it difficult to do so in everyday life. Research in HCI has shown the potential of systems to support reflection in different contexts. In this paper we present a design space for supporting everyday life reflection. We produced a workbook with a selection of conceptual design proposals, which show how systems can take different roles in the process of reflection: triggering, supporting and capturing. We describe a design space with two dimensions by combining these roles with strategies found in literature. We contribute to the extensive body of work on reflection by outlining how design for everyday life reflection requires a focus on more holistic reflection, design with openness and integration in everyday life.

Many current wearables have a technology-driven background: the focus is primarily on functionality, while their possible personal and social-cultural value is underappreciated. We think that developing wearables from a jewellery perspective can compensate for this. The personal and social cultural values embodied by traditional jewellery are often tightly connected to their function as memento. In this paper we reflect from a jewellery perspective, a memory-studies perspective and a TEI-perspective on three design proposals for interactive jewellery. We identify 1) drawing inspiration from interaction with traditional jewellery, 2) using relatively simple technology with high experiential qualities, 3) abstract and poetic data representation and 4) storing data uniquely on the digital jewel as possible design directions.

Most interactions with today’s interfaces require a person’s full and focused attention. To alleviate the potential clutter of focal information, we investigated how interactions could be designed to take place in the background or periphery of attention. This paper explores whether gestural, multimodal interaction styles of an interactive light system allow for this. A study compared the performance of interactions with the light system in two conditions: the central condition in which participants interacted only with the light system, and the peripheral condition in which they interacted with the system while performing a high-attentional task simultaneously. Our study furthermore compared different feedback styles (visual, auditory, haptic, and a combination). Results indicated that especially for the combination feedback style, the interaction could take place without participants’ full visual attention, and performance did not significantly decrease in the peripheral condition. This seems to indicate that these interactions at least partly took place in their periphery of attention and that the multimodal feedback style aided this process.

Interactive devices can support personal remembering to benefit well-being. These designs require insight into what brings the past to mind, and how people relate to such cues. Prior work focused on mementos in the home; instead, this paper presents a diary and interview study of involuntary memory cueing in everyday life. Data was collected from fifteen adult individuals, using sentence completion diaries, combined with debriefing interviews. Qualitative analysis of the data showed that these participants were relying on everyday physical objects like food items for cueing memories during everyday life, locations and (repeated) activities, while digital items and photos were shown to be less frequent stimulants. Meaningful relations to memory cues can be partially explained from a memory cueing perspective. We discuss how design for remembering can benefit from our insights, through careful trade-offs in timing, exposure to cues, and supporting a process of personal attachment with items invoking memories.

More and more objects of our everyday environment are becoming smart and connected, offering us new interaction possibilities. Tangible interaction and gestural interaction are promising communication means with these objects in this post-WIMP interaction era. Although based on different principles, they both exploit our body awareness and our skills to provide a richer and more intuitive interaction. Occasionally, when user gestures involve physical artifacts, tangible interaction and gestural interaction can blend into a new paradigm, i.e., tangible gesture interaction [5]. This workshop fosters the comparison among these different interaction paradigms and offers a unique opportunity to discuss their analogies and differences, as well as the definitions, boundaries, strengths, application domains and perspectives of tangible gesture interaction. Participants from different backgrounds are invited.

Many actions in the physical world take place in the background or periphery of people’s attention. However, interactions with computing technologies usually require focused attention. This article explores the concept of peripheral interaction: physical interaction with technology that takes place outside the focus of attention. A peripheral interaction design (called FireFlies), which supports primary school teachers in their everyday routine through open-ended light-objects on the children’s desks, was deployed in 4 classrooms for 6 weeks. Results of interviews and video analysis indicate that the 6 participating teachers were able to physically interact with the FireFlies interactive artifact quickly and frequently without disturbing ongoing tasks. In the final weeks of the study, the teachers seemed able to easily shift their focus of attention between their main task and the interactive system. We therefore conclude that, even though it is difficult to measure people’s attention, a longitudinal approach seemed effective to find indicators for peripheral interaction.

Walking is a physical activity that most people do on a daily basis. It is often characterized as a utilitarian means of locomotion; our basic, habitual mode of getting around from place to place. Walking can also be considered a creative and expressive act, with the potential for inspiring the design of interactive surfaces to support and mediate these aesthetic aspects. We draw on understandings of walking from a range of perspectives including biomechanics, ecological perception, anthropology and dance to inform the design and evaluation of an interactive surface. This surface, the Slow Floor, is intended to encourage a reflective engagement with the act of walking. We present the design and initial user evaluation of the Slow Floor, a pressure sensitive sound-generating surface, with a group of Butoh dancers performing a slow walk. The evaluation reveals a unique creative agency when walking on the Slow Floor compared to the internal focus on awareness when slow walking without the interactive surface. This creative agency provides new knowledge on the role interactive surfaces can play in developing awareness of movement and internal felt experience contributing to the discussion around somatics and HCI.

Feedback and affordances are two of the most well-known principles in interaction design. Unfortunately, the related and equally important notion of feedforward has not been given as much consideration. Nevertheless, feedforward is a powerful design principle for bridging Norman's Gulf of Execution. We reframe feedforward by disambiguating it from related design principles such as feedback and perceived affordances, and identify new classes of feedforward. In addition, we present a reference framework that provides a means for designers to explore and recognize different opportunities for feedforward.

This paper presents a research-through-design study into interactive systems for a primary school setting to support teachers' everyday tasks. We developed an open-ended interactive system called FireFlies, which is intended to be interacted with in the periphery of the teacher's attention and thereby become an integral part of everyday routines. FireFlies uses light-objects and audio as a (background) information display. Furthermore, teachers can manipulate the light and audio through physical interaction. A working prototype of FireFlies was deployed in four different classrooms for six weeks. Qualitative results reveal that all teachers found a relevant way of working with FireFlies, which they applied every day of the evaluation. After the study had ended and the systems were removed from the schools, the teachers kept reaching for the devices and mentioned they missed FireFlies, which shows that it had become part of their everyday routine.

This paper explores how different interfaces to a problem-solving task affect how users perform it. Specifically, it focuses on a customized version of the game of Four-in-a-row and compares play on a physical, tangible game board with that conducted in mouse and touch-screen driven virtual versions. This is achieved through a repeated measures study involving a total of 36 participants and which explicitly assesses aspects of cognitive work through measures of time task, subjective workload, the projection of mental constructs onto external structures and the occurrence of explanatory epistemic actions. The results highlight the relevance of projection and epistemic action to this problem-solving task and suggest that the different interface forms afford instantiation of these activities in different ways. The tangible version of the system supports the most rapid execution of these actions and future work on this topic should explore the unique advantages of tangible interfaces in supporting epistemic actions.

In our global village, distance is not a barrier anymore for traveling. People experience new cultures and face accompanying difficulties in order to live anywhere. Social support can help these sojourners to cope with difficulties, such as culture shock. In this paper, we investigate how computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools can facilitate social support when living physically separated from loved-ones in different cultures. The goal is to understand the design considerations necessary to design new CMC tools. We studied communication practices of Chinese sojourners living in the Netherlands and the use of a technology probe with a novel video communication system. These results led to recommendations which can help designers to design interactive communication tools that facilitate communication across cultures. We conclude the paper with an interactive communication device called Circadian, which was designed based on these recommendations. We experienced the design recommendations to be abstract enough to leave space for creativity while providing a set of clear requirements which we used to base design decisions upon.

Because most teenagers strive for freedom and try to live autonomously, communication with their parents could be improved. It appeared from a literature review and a diary study that parent-teenager communication primarily addresses teenager-oriented everyday activities. However, it also showed teenagers have a substantial interest in getting to know their parents and their parents’ past. The study described in this paper seeks to address this opportunity by designing a product for parents and teenagers that facilitates communication about the past of the parents. The resulting design, called Cueb, is a set of interactive digital photo cubes with which parents and teenagers can explore individual and shared experiences and are triggered to exchange stories. An evaluation of a prototype of Cueb with four families showed that the participants felt significantly more triggered and supported to share their experiences and tell stories with Cueb’s full functionality (connecting cubes, switching, and locking photographs) than with limited functionality (shaking to display random photographs), similar to more traditional photo media.

This article focuses on the conceptual relation between the user's input and a system's output in interaction with smart tangible objects. Understanding this input-output relation (IO relation) is a prerequisite for the design of meaningful interaction. A meaningful IO relation allows the user to know what to do with a system to achieve a certain goal and to evaluate the outcome. The work discussed in this article followed a design research process in which four concepts were developed and prototyped. An evaluation was performed using these prototypes to investigate the effect of highly different IO relations on the user's understanding of the interaction. The evaluation revealed two types of IO relations differing in functionality and the number of mappings between the user and system actions. These two types of relations are described by two IO models that provide an overview of these mappings. Furthermore, they illustrate the role of the user and the influence of the system in the process of understanding the interaction. The analysis of the two types of IO models illustrates the value of understanding IO relations for the design of smart tangible objects.

Theories of embodiment focus on how practical engagement and the structure of the body shape perception, experience, and cognition. They typically reject a view of human cognition as grounded in abstract information processing. The concept of embodied interaction is increasingly used in the design, analysis, and evaluation of interactions with and around technology. However, many questions remain as to exactly what embodied interaction means and whether it can be considered a coherent program of research. The opportunities to support embodied interaction have expanded significantly in recent years with the development of a range of technologies designed to sense movements of the body and the continued development of ubiquitous computing infrastructures that can gather or represent contextual data. There has also been a surge of interest in embodiment in HCI.

As we go about our everyday routines we encounter and interact with numerous physical (e.g. furniture or clothes) and digital objects (e.g. photos or e-mails). Some of these objects may be particular cherished, for example because of memories attached to them. As several studies into cherished objects have shown, we have more difficulties identifying cherished digital objects than physical ones. However, cherishing a small collection of digital objects can be beneficial; e.g. it can encourage active selection of digital objects to keep and discard. This paper presents a study that aimed to increase understanding of cherished physical and digital objects, and beyond that, of how we perceive physical and digital objects, and their advantages and disadvantages. We identified design opportunities for novel products and systems that support the creation of more cherishable digital objects by extrapolating the advantages of the physical to the digital, exploiting the reasons for cherishing digital objects, and aiming for meaningful integrations of physical and digital.

This paper explores the concept of peripheral interactions; interactions with technology that take place in the background or periphery of the attention. We present two designs for a classroom setting. CawClock makes selected time frames audible in order to provide teachers with awareness of time. NoteLet is designed to support the teacher in observing children's behavior, by enabling him or her to take pictures of the classroom through straightforward interactions on a bracelet. A qualitative, two-week exploration of both systems in a classroom revealed that the soundscapes of CawClock indeed shifted to the periphery of the attention and supported the teacher's time awareness. The actions with NoteLet did not shift to the periphery. However, the tangible aspects of NoteLet seemed to facilitate the interaction to be quick and simple, which may indicate that it could shift to the periphery with more practice. Tangible interaction therefore seems a promising interaction style for this purpose.

This special issue focuses on new uses of digital media to help people remember in everyday situations. We begin this introduction by describing the field’s origins (personal memories past), using this to contextualise the papers presented here (personal memories present). We conclude by identifying a number of important research challenges that we feelmust be addressed by future work in this area (personal memories future).

Photographic mementos are important signifiers of our personal memories. Rather than simply passive representations of memories to "preserved" memories, these photos of the past are actively displayed and consumed in the context of everyday behaviour and social practices. Within the context of these settings, these mementos are invoked in particular ways in order to mobilise particular social relations in the present. Taking this perspective, we explore how photo mementos come to be used in the everyday social setting of sharing meal providing a resource that can be mobilised for particular social relations in these settings. Rather than a simple concern with nutritional consumption, the shared meal is a social event and important cultural site in the organisation of family and social life with culturally specific rhythms, norms, rights and responsibilities. We present a system - 4 Photos - that situates photo mementos within the social concerns of these settings. The system collates photo mementos from those attending the meal and displays them at the dining table to be interacted with by all. Through a fieldwork deployment of the system we explore the social work performed by invoking these personal memory resources in the context of real world settings of shared eating. We highlight particular features of the system that enable this social work to be achieved.

Interactions in and with the physical world have enabled us to perform everyday activities in the periphery of our attention. Even though digital technologies are becoming increasingly present in the everyday environment, interaction with these technologies usually requires people’s focused attention. In the realm of the vision of calm technology, we think that designing interactions with the digital world inspired by our peripheral interaction with the physical world, will enable digital technologies to better blend into our everyday lives. However, for such interaction design to be effective, a detailed understanding of the everyday periphery is required. In this paper, we therefore present a qualitative study on everyday activities that may take place in the periphery of the attention. We provide a broad range of examples of such everyday activities and cluster them to present the conditions under which they may be performed peripherally. Furthermore, we discuss how our findings may be relevant for the design of peripheral interactions with digital technologies, and present two conceptual designs that are based on our findings.

For centuries, learning and development has been supported by physical activity and manipulating physical objects. With the introduction of embedded technologies, opportunities for employing tangible or embodied interaction for learning and development have emerged. As a result of previous research, we have seen that interaction models based on embodied knowledge (through embodied metaphors) can support children’s learning in abstract domains. Although metaphorical mappings are promoted in tangible and embodied interaction research, little is known about how to identify embodied metaphors, or how to implement them effectively into interaction models. In this paper, we introduce a people-centered, iterative approach to the design of tangible learning systems with embodied metaphor-based mappings. As a design case, we implemented our approach to the design of Moving Sounds (MoSo) Tangibles; a tangible system for learning abstract sound concepts. The system consists of a set of interactive tangibles with which children can manipulate pitch, volume, and tempo of ongoing tones. In a user study with 39 participants, we found that all children were able to reproduce sound samples with MoSo Tangibles.

This paper focuses on the old school game of shooting marbles. We investigate which aspects of this tangible game make it popular and show how experienced fun can increase by elaborating such aspects through an iterative design process. A questionnaire and field study, tailored to the user group of primary school children aged 9–12 years old, revealed that aspects within areas of physical control, surface of the playground, opponent, and stakes of the game had the biggest influence on the fun experience of shooting marbles. A gameflow model and fun toolkit were used to improve the game in these respective areas. This resulted in a moving marble hole entitled Marbowl: a tangible marble game that augments existing game aspects such as timing, distance, surface, and other physical and environmental influences. A working prototype was field tested with 24 children at a primary school. Results show that different gameflow areas like concentration needed, playability, difficulty to win the game, and amount of challenge, increased in a positive way. Together these findings concluded that compared with the original marble game, children experienced a higher level of fun while playing with Marbowl.

Using tangible interaction in interactive educational systems can benefit learning. This can be supported by relying on experientially originating schemata in the interaction design of learning systems. This paper presents the design and evaluation of MoSo Tangibles, a set of interactive, physical artifacts with which children manipulate the pitch, volume and tempo of ongoing tones, in order to structure their understanding of these abstract sound concepts in terms of multiple different concrete body-based concepts. The results indicate that MoSo provided children with a physical handle to reason about the targeted abstract concepts.

You buy a new TV and get a new remote, you buy a DVD player and you get another remote, you buy a sound system and guess what& Almost every digital media product comes with its own designated remote control (RC). What would happen if one remote adapts to the owner's activities and is able to have cross-device control? In this paper we describe a design exploration conducted to create new ways to interact with digital media products. The main ingredients are: fit for a social setting, portable, and including physical interaction. The result is an exploration of a button less single-hand remote control concept.

Reading books can serve as a means of gathering information, relaxing and escaping daily stress. Although reading is often primarily an individual activity, many readers also enjoy sharing reading experiences with friends, relatives, colleagues and, through the internet, even with strangers. Apart from valuing these individual and collective book activities, books as physical artifacts are also valued, for example because of the memories associated with them. This paper investigates how books can be enhanced with a new product, system or service. In a qualitative interview study, the main reasons for valuing books were found to be related to the self (individual activities and feelings), experiences (e.g., enjoyment or release) and personal values (e.g., embodiment of ideals or personification). As a result, it was decided for the remainder of this study to focus on communication about books, because in addition to individual book-related activities and feelings, users indicated to communicate about books a lot. A book community Web site, called Shelf, was developed to investigate whether book communication could be increased by facilitating an online community and whether users would appreciate the Web site functionality. Shelf was used in a 14-day user evaluation, and it was concluded that the Web site increased the extent to which readers communicated about books. We expect that such an online book community would be a valuable enhancement of current book customs, in particular in combination with the current e-book trend, for various types of readers who would like to share their experiences.

Physical activity and manipulating physical objects can be beneficial for learning. Earlier studies 2 have shown that interaction models that rely on unconscious and embodied knowledge (based on embodied metaphors) can benefit the learning process. However, more than one embodied metaphor might be applicable. In this paper, we present the results of a user study (n=65) designed to identify embodied metaphors seven to nine year old children use when enacting abstract concepts related to musical sound. The results provide evidence that multiple different embodied metaphors can unconsciously be used to structure the understanding of these concepts. In addition, we have identified and categorized commonly used metaphors based on the children's enactments of changing sound concepts.

Supporting users' reasoned imagination in sense making during interaction with tangible and embedded computation involves supporting the application of their existing mental schemata in understanding new forms of interaction. Recent studies that include an embodied metaphor in the interaction model, which relates action-based inputs to digital outputs, have provided evidence that this approach is beneficial. Yet the design of such systems has been difficult and full of setbacks. Wide spread adoption of this approach requires a better understanding of how to design such embodied metaphor-based interactional models. We analyze three recent design-based research studies in which we have been involved in order to derive design knowledge that may inform others. Following a case study methodology we identify kernels or points in the design process where discontinuities between predicted and actual interaction highlight important design knowledge.

Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past.

When meeting someone new, the first impression is often influenced by someone’s physical appearance and other types of prejudice. In this paper, we present TouchMeDare, an interactive canvas, which aims to provide an experience when meeting new people, while preventing visual prejudice and lowering potential thresholds. The focus of the designed experience was to stimulate people to get acquainted through the interactive canvas. TouchMeDare consists of a flexible, opaque canvas, which plays music when touched simultaneously from both sides. Dynamic variation of this bodily contact is reflected through real-time adaptations of the musical compositions. Two redesigns were qualitatively and quantitatively evaluated and a final version was placed in the Lowlands Festival as a case study. Evaluation results showed that some explanation was needed for the initial interaction with the installation. On the other hand, after this initial unfamiliarity passed, results showed that making bodily contact through the installation did help people to get acquainted with each other and increased their social interaction.

Autobiographical memory (AM) is the “memory for the events in one’s life” [ 1 ]. Often it is assumed that in order to remember all those events, you just need to record everything and when you replay these recordings you will remember those events. You can compare this with a library metaphor that has been used to explain AM according to the record-keeping approach. However, after many years of AM-research it was concluded that AM is stored in a different manner, namely according to the constructionist approach, which often is initiated by memory cues. This paper explains these AM theories, surveys literature on existing augmented memory systems and describes our own work in this area. All this input is combined into eight design recommendations for future augmented memory systems.

Children are really intrigued by television and computers. However, the interaction with these products hardly requires any form of body movement. This paper presents two case studies of product designs that provide more opportunities for children to enjoy physical play activities.

This workshop addresses questions related to the areas of tangible interaction, game design and emerging technologies for tangible and tabletop games. We bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse fields related to these topics, such as HCI, computer science, interaction design and game design. We seek collaborative ways to move forward the field of tangible and tabletop games.

In this paper we describe the game 'Weathergods', which is implemented on the Entertaible tabletop gaming platform [1]. The game uses either iconic or symbolic [2] tangible objects for interaction and marries both the advantages of traditional board games and computer games.

The research on Tangible Interaction (TI) has been inspired by many different disciplines, including psychology, sociology, engineering and human-computer interaction (HCI). Now that the field is getting more mature, in the sense that basic technologies and interaction paradigms have been explored, we observe a growing potential for a more design-oriented research approach. We suggest that there are several arguments for this proposed broadening of the TI-perspective: 1) the need for designing products within contexts-of-use that are much more challenging and diverse than the task-oriented desktop (or tabletop) systems that mostly inspire us today, 2) the interest to also design TI starting from existing physical activities instead of only as add-ons to digital applications, 3) the need for iterative design and evaluation of prototypes in order to develop applications that are grounded within daily practice over prolonged periods of time, and 4) the need to extend ease-of-use to more hedonic aspects of interaction such as fun and engagement