Money is increasingly accessed through multifunctional digital platforms via mobile payment and banking apps that offer various financial services, several of which integrate social media connectivity. In China, Alipay and WeChat Pay handle billions of transactions annually to the extent that physical cards and cash are rarely carried or used. These platforms have been described as ‘walled gardens’ because financial transfers cannot be made directly between them. While Alipay and WeChat Pay share similar transactional components, they differ in their financial products, constraints, interdependencies and social media integrations, and each offers different interactional possibilities for users to meet their everyday financial needs. We examine how users navigate infrastructural payment problems, perform financial management across different platforms and accounts, deal with ‘trouble’ in making payments, and weave their social and financial lives across platforms to create interoperability between these otherwise disconnected services. Our analysis suggests these apps do not just initiate, record and track payments, but are actively configured by users through interconnected social, transactional and money-management practices, and that user interactions and digital payment practices are shaped by complex socio-financial arrangements. We discuss the findings, drawing implications for designing social-financial interactions in bridging disconnected services.

The move towards digital payments and mobile money, and away from physical cash and banking services offers users opportunities to change the ways that they can spend, save and manage their money through a variety of personal financial management services. However, set against ordinary, everyday patterns of spending, saving and other forms of financial transaction, it is not clear how users might interact with, understand, or value financial management services that utilise rich data and connected digital content for their personal use. In order to explore how people might engage with such systems, we conducted a study of financial activity, following people's transactional activity over time, and interviewing them about their practices, understandings, needs, concerns and expectations of current and future financial technologies. Drawing from the everyday activities and practices observed, we identify implications for the design of digitally enabled, personal financial systems.

The emergence of various forms of digital money and innovative digital financial services allows stores of value to be created, held, moved, measured, and exchanged in novel ways. Yet the success of these new forms of transactional media is largely dependent on the ways that they are understood as useful and credible as viable forms of exchange, and on how they support the ways that their users interact around them. This article therefore examines interactional work around the use of money in making financial transactions: we call this moneywork . We report on an empirical study of the patterns of behavior of users of a mixed media (digital and analog) currency that supports mobile device payments—the Bristol Pound—exploring the impacts of its users’ understanding of the systems that underlie these transactions, the technical constraints on their potential for action, their practices of use, and the social interactions that these activities lie within. We draw design implications to support these payment practices.

We present a study of children collaborating around interactive tabletops in three different countries: India, the United Kingdom and Finland. Our data highlights the key distinctive physical strategies used by children when performing collaborative tasks during this study. Children in India employ dynamic positioning with frequent physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in the UK tend to prefer static positioning with minimal physical contact and simultaneous object movement. Children in Finland use a mixture of dynamic and static positioning with minimal physical contact and object movement. Our findings indicate the importance of understanding collaboration strategies and behaviours when designing and deploying interactive tabletops in heterogeneous educational environments. We conclude with a discussion on how designers of tabletops for schools can provide opportunities for children in different countries to define and shape their own collaboration strategies for small group learning that take into account their different classroom practices.

There is a rapidly growing momentum driving the development of mobile payment systems for co-present interactions, using near-field communication on smartphones and contactless payment systems. The design (and marketing) imperative for this is to enable faster, simpler, effortless and secure transactions, yet our evidence shows that this focus on reducing transactional friction may ignore other important features around making payments. We draw from empirical data to consider user interactions around financial exchanges made on mobile phones. Our findings examine how the practices around making payments support people in making connections, to other people, to their communities, to the places they move through, to their environment, and to what they consume. While these social and community bonds shape the kinds of interactions that become possible, they also shape how users feel about, and act on, the values that they hold with their co-users. We draw implications for future payment systems that make use of community connections, build trust, leverage transactional latency, and generate opportunities for rich social interactions.

This paper examines routine family car journeys, looking specifically at how passengers assist during a mobile telephone call while the drivers address the competing demands of handling the vehicle, interacting with various artefacts and controls in the cabin, and engage in co-located and remote conversations while navigating through busy city roads. Based on an analysis of video fragments, we see how drivers and child passengers form their conversations and requests around the call so as to be meaningful and paced to the demands, knowledge and abilities of their co-occupants, and how the conditions of the road and emergent traffic are oriented to and negotiated in the context of the social interaction that they exist alongside. The study provides implications for the design of car-based collaborative media and considers how hands- and eyes-free natural interfaces could be tailored to the complexity of activities in the car and on the road.

Interactive tables provide multi-touch capabilities that can enable children to collaborate face-to-face simultaneously. In this paper we extend existing understanding of children's use of interactive tabletops by examining their use by school children in a school in Delhi, India. In the study, we explore how the school children exhibit particular types of collaboration strategies and touch input techniques when dealing with digital objects. In particular, we highlight a number of behaviours of interest, such as how the children would move the same digital object on the table together. We also discuss how the children work in close proximity to each other and dynamically organize their spatial positions in order to work together, as well as establish territory and control. We go on to examine some of the finger-based interaction and manipulation strategies that arise in these contexts. Finally, the paper considers the implications of such behaviours for the deployment of tabletop applications in these particular educational contexts.

We explore the use of a live video broadcast system by a group of amateur camera operators to film an event on networked cameraphones. Using an interaction analysis of physical interactions and orientations to the work of others, we examine their choice of camera angles and positions in their filming as they attempt to provide interesting visual content and a coherent narrative. Findings illustrate how users adapt their behaviour as co-ordination problems occur by drawing from a set of everyday visual practices ('amateur vision'). They also show how the specifically temporal aspect of live video requires extended attention on its production, and that this is at odds with the 'recreational orientation' of amateur film crews who simultaneously participate in events for their own enjoyment and film them on behalf of other viewers. Implications for the design of collaborative live broadcast media are made, focusing on approaches to interaction design that augment users' visual practices and allow users to look on behalf of others while experiencing places and events themselves.

This paper presents the findings of a user study investigating conversational patterns across three conditions of table-based interaction (direct touch interactive table, pantograph interactive table and non-digital table) for different types of educational activities. Findings demonstrate that communication style is significantly affected by interaction techniques. The direct touch technique stimulated conversations based around the topic and pedagogical method. The pantograph technique promoted playfulness and had a higher number of directive utterances between participants, with fewer task-based, group-oriented utterances. The non-digital table promoted reflective forms of task-orientated utterance, encouraged group communication and fostered more equitable participation between members. The findings provide insights into the design of interactive tables to support particular forms of social interaction.

In this paper we explore the production of streaming media that involves live and recorded content. To examine this, we report on how the production practices and process are conducted through an empirical study of the production of live television, involving the use of live and non-live media under highly time critical conditions. In explaining how this process is managed both as an individual and collective activity, we develop the concept of temporal hybridity to explain the properties of these kinds of production system and show how temporally separated media are used, understood and coordinated. Our analysis is examined in the light of recent developments in computing technology and we present some design implications to support amateur video production.

This paper examines the work and interactions between camera operators and a vision mixer during an ice hockey match, and presents an interaction analysis using video data. We analyze video-mediated indexical gestures in the collaborative production of live sport on television between distributed team members. The findings demonstrate how video forms the topic, resource and product of collabora-tion: whilst it shapes the nature of the work (editing), it is simultaneously also the primary resource for supporting mutual orientation and negotiating shot transitions between remote participants (co-ordination), as well as its end prod-uct (broadcast). Our analysis of current professional activi-ties is used to develop implications for the design of future services for live collaborative video production.

This paper presents a semiotic technique as a means of exploring meaning and understanding in interface design and use. This is examined through a study of the interaction between the ‘file’ metaphor and ‘save as’ command metaphor. The behaviour of these (from a functional or computational basis) do not exactly match, or map onto, the meaning of the metaphor. We examine both the denotation of a term to the user, i.e. its literal meaning to that person, and the term's connotations, i.e. any other meanings associated with the term. We suggest that the technique applied is useful in predicting future problems with understanding the use of metaphor at the interface and with designing appropriate signification for human-computer interaction. Variation in connotation was expected but a more fundamental difference in denotation was also uncovered. Moreover, the results clearly demonstrate that consistency in the denotation of a term is critical in achieving a good user understanding of the command.

We document the rationale and design of a multimodal interface to a pervasive/ubiquitous computing system that supports independent living by older people in their own homes. The Millennium Home system involves fitting a resident's home with sensors--these sensors can be used to trigger sequences of interaction with the resident to warn them about dangerous events, or to check if they need external help. We draw lessons from the design process and conclude the paper with implications for the design of multimodal interfaces to ubiquitous systems developed for the elderly and in healthcare, as well as for more general ubiquitous computing applications.

Advances in display technology are creating more opportunities for situating displays in our environment. While these displays share some common design principles with display-based interaction at the desktop PC, situated displays also have unique characteristics and values that raise particular design considerations and challenges. In order to further understand situated display design we present a field study of RoomWizard, an interactive room reservation display appliance designed to be mounted outside meeting rooms. The findings illustrate important ways that individual and social behaviours were oriented around the persistent situated displays. These observed behaviours are discussed in relation to particular design characteristics of RoomWizard. We conclude by highlighting more general themes supporting the design of other situated display technologies.

The article comments on, and critiques, a view of IS as an independent discipline. It argues that, rather than being a subject that is distinct and distinguishable from existing research disciplines, it cannot be seen as uniquely different, and to attempt to do so would be theoretically and practically unsafe. A number of suggestions as to how IS research might be conducted and assessed in light of this claim are made.

The rapid and accelerating move towards use of mobile technologies has increasingly provided people and organizations with the ability to work away from the office and on the move. The new ways of working afforded by these technologies are often characterized in terms of access to information and people anytime, anywhere. This article presents a study of mobile workers that highlights different facets ofaccessto remote people and information, and different facets ofanytime, anywhere. Four key factors in mobile work are identified: the role of planning, working in "dead time," accessing remote technological and informational resources, and monitoring the activities of remote colleagues. By reflecting on these issues, we can better understand the role of technology and artifacts in mobile work and identify the opportunities for the development of appropriate technological solutions to support mobile workers.

Unlike other technologies, the telephone is unusual in that it cannot be ‘turned off’. Almost uniquely, its design does not incorporate an off switch, or when it does, it tends to be located in an inaccessible position (such as on the underside of the phone). Rather than arguing that this is a special feature of telephones, this paper argues that this is an example of designers seeing rules as generators of action, rather than resources for action. That is, a rule of phone behaviour is “when a phone rings, answer it”. However, rules do not simply generate action. We can choose when not to follow it. Support for this case has been neglected by designers, forcing individuals to appropriate other technologies to support not answering the phone. These rules of use are implicit in how we conceptualise the use of technology, and in turn, how we perform design. We suggest that designers can be aided by understanding better the nature of rule following, allowing them to design technology that supports ‘deviant’, yet equally valid modes of use.