Generative AI offers scalable engagement with digital cultural heritage, yet current workflows rely on complex prompts, creating an interaction bottleneck for non-expert audiences. To address this gap, we introduce MoodCurator, a web-based design probe enabling low-friction, implicit affective steering for curatorial storytelling. The system replaces prompt engineering with a three-channel loop: audiences (1) select a colour palette to suggest narrative tone; (2) curate artworks to ground the narrative in visual content; and (3) choose an interpretive voice to constrain rhetorical stance. A mixed-methods study (N = 64) demonstrated encouraging patterns of perceived usability and user agency. A follow-up think-aloud study (N = 10) surfaced recurring cases of interpretive mismatch in this English-language deployment. Contributions include: (1) a legible steering paradigm for AI-supported cultural interpretation; (2) exploratory empirical evidence on usability, agency, and narrative resonance; and (3) preliminary design implications for more explicit and contestable framing controls in future systems.

With workplace buildings becoming increasingly sensor-rich environments and amidst climate change and global pandemic pressures, there is novel opportunity for utilizing climatic data within buildings for awareness and wellbeing purposes. Interaction design research, including on large, shared-displays, rarely addresses building occupants’ experiences of air quality (AQ); and to-date there are no studies evaluating such interventions in the context of communicating climatic data in the workplace. Responding to these research gaps, three prototype-led studies were conducted with 21 occupants of a smart office building over June-August 2022, evaluating occupants’ experiences of a large shape- and color-changing display responding to AQ data. A thematic analysis resulted in design implications for improving shape- and color-changing displays for communicating AQ data; linking biomimicry to data interpretation. Contributing to Human-Building Interaction (HBI) research in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) field, we provide design directions for future shape-changing and responsive architectures for climate awareness in smart buildings.

Despite the growing popularity and applications of AI-driven chatbots across various domains, their potential to support people with dementia remains relatively under-explored in human–computer interaction (HCI). To address this gap, we conducted four workshops with 17 participants (5 with mild dementia and 12 informal caregivers) to explore the needs, concerns, and preferences of people with dementia regarding chatbot use. This study focuses specifically on the insights gained from participants with dementia. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed that participants expressed interest in AI chatbots for casual interactions, particularly to alleviate social isolation and maintain language skills. They also saw the chatbots’ potential to act as ‘digital diaries’ for memory triggers and to offer memory training exercises to help with challenges in recalling names and words. However, concerns were raised about over-reliance, awareness of conversing with a chatbot, and trust.

We describe the design of Loci Stories – a networked storytelling cabinet which uses voice recognition to tell colourful and unique stories from volunteers working at an English country hall. Loci Stories was created as part of a wider co-design research within heritage venues that sought to improve interpretation and designs approaches engaging with polyvocality. The work aimed to nuance existing authorised heritage discourse interpretations by championing the stories of volunteers who have a unique perspective on the place. We contribute an account of our design and its evaluation findings to propose four “textures” of polyvocality inspired by music theory – monophony, homophony, polyphony, and cacophony. We discuss Loci Stories through the lens of these textures and situate our work in furthering the design space of polyvocal heritage-based interaction design.

Quantified smart buildings increasingly utilise data-rich technologies (such as embedded sensors and personal wearables). Research and development however, rarely addresses occupants’ experiences and expectations in such environments, which is critical for designing ethical and occupant-centred workspaces. To support the design of human-centred smart buildings, a series of 4 workshops was conducted with a total of 27 participants, over 2 months, with occupants of a smart office building. Workshops used discursive (focus group) and projective (design fiction) techniques to qualitatively explore occupants’ perceptions of and concerns around the collection, processing and use of data within the building. Workshop data was thematically analysed, resulting in design implications for improving occupant experience in current smart workplaces, while also contributing implications for increasing the perceivability, accessibility and usability of data in such buildings. Contributing to discourses around Human-Building Interaction the paper concludes with discussion of future research challenges for occupant-centred development of quantified buildings.

Recent HCI research has addressed emerging approaches for public engagement. One such public-facing method which has gained popularity over the previous decade has been open design events, or hackathons. In this article, we report on DemVR, a hackathon event that invited designers, technologists, and students of these disciplines to design Virtual Reality (VR) environments for people with dementia and their care partners. While our event gained reasonable attraction from designers and developers, this article unpacks the challenges in representing and involving people with dementia in these events, which had multiple knock-on effects on participant's outputs. Our analysis presents insights into participants’ motivations, challenges participants faced when constructing their “absent user”, and the design features teams developed to address the social context of the user. We conclude the article by proposing a set of commitments for collaborative design events, community building through design, and reification in design.

eBay is the world's largest auction site, with a variety of antique, vintage and one-off items listed. In-person shopping for these frequently takes place within markets and antiques fairs, underpinned by a rich set of co-browsing practices. However, these collective shopping experiences are poorly supported online, with platforms predominantly designed to accommodate and support an individual user experience. Using collective autoethnography (CAE) over a period of 15 months we engaged in a series of (16) online co-browsing sessions using a configuration of video-mediated communication to co-browse eBay together, augmenting the interface to introduce sociality. This was supplemented by 8hrs of field studies split over two in-person co-browsing sessions within physical retail locations. From these studies we draw together insights on the experiential nature and practices of co-browsing on and offline, presenting recommendations to inform the design of future online retail spaces, with an aim to support better collaboration and sociality.

In our data-centric world, most services rely on collecting and using personal data. The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to enhance individuals’ control over their data, but its practical impact is not well understood. We present a 10-participant study, where each participant filed 4-5 data access requests. Through interviews accompanying these requests and discussions scrutinising returned data, it appears that GDPR falls short of its goals due to non-compliance and low-quality responses. Participants found their hopes to understand providers’ data practices or harness their own data unmet. This causes increased distrust without any subjective improvement in power, although more transparent providers do earn greater trust. We propose designing more effective, data-inclusive and open policies and data access systems to improve both customer relations and individual agency, and also that wider public use of GDPR rights could help with delivering accountability and motivating providers to improve data practices.

Educational technologies offer benefits in the classroom but there are barriers to their successful integration, including teachers’ pedagogical beliefs and their skills and experience. Participatory Design (PD) approaches offer one way in which teachers can be directly involved in the design of classroom technologies, however PD processes alone fail to address the challenges of integrating technology within existing practices. In this paper we propose co-teaching as a novel form of co-design practice. We describe a two year longitudinal Co-Teaching project resulting in the development and use of three digital designs for the classroom. Using the TPACK model to guide our reflections we offer insights into the ways that co-teaching can support the design and integration of educational technologies. We suggest that co-teaching as a form of co-design practice offers a way to move teachers from passive adopters of technology to active participants in the design and integration of educational technologies.

Home decor defines how people experience and share spaces, with the decorative elements forming the ‘interface’ to the home. Despite the opportunities of embedding technology within these elements, research to date has not explored this fully. This paper brings home decor to interaction design utilizing decorative elements as a vehicle to incorporate tangible interaction in domestic spaces. In an IKEA-like format, we designed a product catalogue of our own prototypes that illustrate the possibilities of the nearest future. These design illustrations should offer inspiration to those who wish to work with interactive materials (e.g. appearance-changing and soft-sensing), particularly in the context of interactive spaces. Through making, situating, and speculating, we show how designing interactive decor can be a promising area in Research-though-Design.

Supporting Practice-based vocational skills development in the classroom can be logistically challenging, however tangible interfaces present natural affordances for supporting such skill development. In the context of teaching stage lighting specifically, we present an open source toolkit based around tangible hardware proxies to support the teaching of practice-based skills. Our tangible proxies embody key configuration, interaction and optical properties of real stage equipment. Drawing on notions of representation and bi-directional digital-to-physical transformation, we design a toolkit that specifically supports a gradual transition between virtual, simulated and real equipment during the learning journey, and open the door to embedding stage craft into schools. Through reporting on deployments in two schools, we discuss the affordances of such proxies and their potential for supporting the teaching and learning of practice-based skills in the classroom.

Memoryscapes presents a detailed case-study of a design-led inquiry concerning the development of immersive experiences to support city-center urban redevelopment, to encourage visiting and touristic activity. Our approach sought to explore how we might make innovative use of local heritage assets, within these digital experiences, to enhance engagement with place. We brought historians, “placemakers”, design-creatives, and technology-developers into dialogue, in a series of co-design sessions (over 9 months, through 6 workshops and with 77 participants). Our initial workshop allowed us to explore and develop extant theories of trajectories and immersive experiences, which led to the development of a design toolkit. The toolkit facilitated further co-design sessions with stakeholder communities. This paper contributes a deepening and nuancing of theory of trajectories by applying it in a specific context, namely heritage-led immersive experiences for use in urban areas; and provides critical reflections on the design toolkit to support interdisciplinary stakeholder development of immersive urban experiences.

Volunteers are an underused but important resource in presenting plural heritages within large heritage organizations. We report on a qualitative study at a heritage site in the UK which combined explorations of volunteers' practice and digital design. The study comprised of observational fieldwork with co-creative activities across eight linked workshops, where we explored the site with volunteers, and how we might leverage existing working structures to make new design prototypes. Our collective account contributes new insights on working with volunteers and the opportunities that arise from acknowledging them as genius loci - recognising them as experts of their own experience and capturing and supporting their skills as storytellers. Working with the volunteering staff in a co-design process we created innovative designs including our Un-authorised View, which draws out the unique perspectives and the personal stories at heritage destinations.

Traditional crafting methods such as stitching, embroidering, dyeing and machine sewing can be enhanced to create novel techniques for embedding shape-changing and colour-changing actuation into soft fabrics. In this paper, we show how embedding Shape-Memory Alloy (SMA) wire, copper wire and thermochromic thread into needles and bobbins, we were able to successfully machine sew interactive morphological capabilities into textiles. We describe the results of extensive design experiments, which detail how differing actuations can be achieved through a matrix of parameters that directly influence a fabric's deformational behaviours. To demonstrate the usefulness of our 10 techniques, we then introduce and discuss an interactive artefact we produced, using a subset of these techniques. We contribute such new techniques for creating soft-interfaces, imbued with actuation through tactile and self-morphing capabilities without motors or LEDs. We draw insights from this on the potential of the proposed techniques for crafting interactive artefacts.

Socially-enabled digital technologies have attracted academic interest for decades, with recent commercial examples of Siri and Alexa, capturing public attention. However, despite ubiquitous visions of a robotic future, very few fully-fledged social robots are currently available to consumers. To improve their designs, studies of their long-term use are particularly valuable, but are currently unavailable. To address this gap, we report on interviews with four long-term users of Pepper - a social robot introduced in 2014. Our thematic analysis elicited insights across three kinds of value Pepper brought to its users: utilitarian functionality; the community that formed around Pepper; and a personal value of affection. We focus on two contributions those values bring to social robot design: social robots as social proxies, alleviating disabilities or acting akin to social media profiles; and robot nurturing as a design construct, going beyond purely utilitarian or hedonistic perspectives on robots.

While there is a renewed interest in voice user interfaces (VUI) in HCI, little attention has been paid to the design of VUI voice output beyond intelligibility and naturalness. We draw on the field of sociophonetics - the study of the social factors that influence the production and perception of speech - to highlight how current VUIs are based on a limited and homogenised set of voice outputs. We argue that current systems do not adequately consider the diversity of peoples' speech, how that diversity represents sociocultural identities, and how voices have the potential to shape user perceptions and experiences. Ultimately, as other technological developments have influenced the ideologies of language, the voice outputs of VUIs will influence the ideologies of speech. Based on our argument, we pose three design strategies for VUI voice output design - individualisation, context awareness, and diversification - to motivate new ways of conceptualising and designing these technologies.

What is ‘open design’ and who gets to say what it is? In the emerging body of literature on open design, there is a clear alignment to the values and practices of free culture and open source software and hardware. Yet this same literature includes multiple, sometimes even contradictory strands of technology practice and research. These different perspectives can be traced back to free culture advocates from the 1970s to the 1990s who formulated the ideal of the internet as inherently empowering, democratizing, and countercultural. However, more recent approaches include feminist and critical interventions into hacking and making as well as corporate strategies of “open innovation” that bring end-users and consumers into the design process. What remains today seems to fall into two schools of thought. On one hand, we have the celebratory endorsements of ‘openness’ as applied to technology and design. On the other hand, we have a continuous and expanding critique of these very ideals and questions, where that critique identifies persisting forms of racial, gender, age, and class-based exclusions, and questions about the relationship between open design, labor and power remain largely unanswered.

This paper presents insights from an ethnographic study with a diverse population of makers in the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. By engaging individuals, groups and communities who 'make' in different contexts, we reveal under-explored perspectives on 'making' and highlight points of intersection between different kinds of making across the city. We reflect on the dynamics of these intersections and connect our observations to emerging discourses around 'open design'. In doing so, we argue for a renewed focus on 'inclusivity' and highlight a need for new infrastructure to support iterative, collaborative making within -- and across -- interconnected networks of makers.

Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilized or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric version that both changes shape and colour (ActuEater2). Four in-situ deployments of 'ActuEaters' in different dinner settings and subsequent 'design crits' showed insights into how people perceive, interpret and interact with such slow-technology in interesting (and often unexpected) ways. The results of our 'ActuEating' studies provide evidence for how an actuating artefact can be simultaneously a resource for social engagement and an interactive decorative. In response, we explore design opportunities for situating novel interactive materials in everyday settings, taking the leap into a new generation of interactive spaces, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities.

We report on a design-led study of the photographic representation of self and family on Facebook during and after becoming parents for the first time. Our experience-centered, research-through-design study engaged eight participants across five UK homes, in a month-long deployment of a prototype technology -- a design research artifact, Admixed Portrait, that served to prompt participant reflection on first-time parenthood. In addition to pre- and post-deployment interviews, participants kept diaries capturing personal reflections during the deployment, on daily social media use and interactions with Admixed. Our qualitative insights on social media representations of transitional experience and identity for new parents, reveal how their online 'photowork' related to self-expression and social functioning. We contribute design considerations for developing tools to support photographic expression in social media use, and methodological insights about design-led inquiry for understanding transitional experiences.

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

Increasing sophistication and ubiquity of digital devices is creating potential for the development of new kinds of actuated interfaces. In this paper, we explore the design space around movement as a form of gestural communication for information output, in simple actuated desktop devices. We were curious as to how people might envision interacting with autonomous technology in the office. Accordingly, we focused our attentions on one prevalent desktop object, an interactive lamp, with three actuated joints, which allowed us to explore the interaction space of such devices. We invited 13 participants to design and enact movements with the lamp to communicate 20 simple messages. We explored a subset of these generated gestures, using the lamp as a personal cueing device in an office setting with 14 new participants. We present our qualitative findings from both studies that let users imagine the usage of an interactive desktop lamp through actuation.

In this paper we explore the practice of ethical responsiveness in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) research, by presenting an empirical case study with a genocide memorial centre in Rwanda, focusing on researcher practice and experience. Our research investigated how this cultural institution operates, working with local and global communities and organizations to sustain its activities. We introduce our case to create a ‘rich picture’ of the ethical context for consideration. Drawing upon our autoethnographic insights as HCI researchers who were members of a larger project team, we will go on to provide a qualitative account of the ethical sensibilities that we engaged in the course of our case study, and specifically how, in conducting and reporting on the research, we chose to position ourselves relative to the institutional values of the centre and the personally held beliefs of its staff, as our research partners, participants, and stakeholders. We also address how our work dealt with broader ethical concerns of working in socially, culturally and politically sensitive settings. Our paper argument hinges around our developing practice of ‘ethical responsiveness’, grounded in established philosophies. We draw upon Pragmatist and Dialogical ethics to position researcher answerability within relationships between the key research partners and stakeholders. We further conceptualize ethics as a lived and emergent concern made manifest through these relationships, experienced in terms of feeling the ethical weight of being answerable to others and being responsive to this in terms of research process. We arrive at the following conclusion: to be answerable to others is to position yourself politically in relation to others. In closing we discuss the implications of this positioning for doing transnational and value sensitive design research in the HCI field.

Abstract Mobile devices enable users to consume media with audio content in a wide range of contexts, with environmental noise being present in many of these. Several methods exist that aim to improve the experience of mobile listening by utilising information about the environmental noise, such as volume and dynamic range adaptation. This paper explores a fundamentally different approach to improving the mobile listening experience by using the object-based audio paradigm, where individual audio sources are mixed in response to each specific listening context. Three experimental studies, containing both quantitative and qualitative aspects, are presented which investigate whether environmental noise influences preference of background-foreground audio object balance in a mix. The results indicate that environmental noise can influence the preferred audio mix and that the nature of the adaptations made is dependent upon both audio content and user. Additionally, qualitative analysis provides an understanding of the role of environmental noise on preferred audio mix. It is believed that the content adaptation method explored in this paper is a simple yet useful tool for adapting content to suit both the context and the user.

In this paper we describe a Research through Design inquiry about a speculative wedding documentation service, in the mode of the Quantified Self. We reflect on our design research, which included design ethnography, interviews, enactments of parts of the service, and the production of a concept brochure. In so doing, we explore the design of personal tracking as a documentary activity, one intended for longer-term self-expression and remembering -- rather than simply to monitor, regulate and motivate a data-driven life. Developing the Lived Informatics discourse, we use our design-led inquiry to propose "Documentary Informatics" as an alternative and longer-term design perspective on self-tracking tools.

The application of Organic User Interface (OUI) technologies will revolutionize interior design, through the development of interactive and actuated surfaces, furnishings and decorative artefacts. However, to adequately explore these new design landscapes we must support multidisciplinary collaboration between Architects, Interior Designers and Technologists. Herein, we present the results of two workshops, with a total of 45 participants from the disciplines of Architecture and Interior Design, supported by a group of HCI researchers. Our objective was to study how design disciplines can productively engage with smart materials as a design resource using an evolving set of techniques to prototype new interactive interior spaces. Our paper reports on our experiences across the two workshops and contributes an understanding of techniques for supporting multidisciplinary collaboration when designing interactive interior spaces.

Viewing the mobile telephone as a networked material, we demonstrate the ways in which we have used it to make Research Products for the "Family Rituals 2.0" inquiry of families separated by work. Drawing from a diversity of sources we survey and deconstruct the phone as a material that can be worked to a vast range of technical effects, extended by hardware and configured by software. We demonstrate the transformations of hacking and prototyping practices necessary to construct complex Research Products through the case study of our machines. We offer the Interaction Design community seven specific and actionable techniques for using mobile telephones in Research Products. Finally, we open up a broader discussion for researchers and practitioners using mobile phones as a design material in their work.

Researchers working in domains such as Research through Design and Feminist HCI have been questioning "dissemination practices" and their impact on our capacity to produce reflexive accounts of research in publications. This paper examines academic dissemination practices within HCI research communities from an institutional to individual level. We unpack the practice via a meta-review of recent literature published in CHI and other venues on 'What is HCI?'. We review the core text on this debate and other similar discussions on HCI methodologies and reflexive accounts of research in domains such as 'Research through Design' and 'Feminist HCI'. We highlight the importance of practicing reflexivity through dissemination and introduce 'Research Fictions' in the form of video essays and live performances, produced by the first author with her colleagues, based on their HCI submissions. Through experimenting with alternative dissemination formats, we argue that our exploratory processes engender a practice of reflexivity within a research lab.

We present findings from a qualitative study about how Internet use supports self-functioning following the life transition of retirement from work. This study recruited six recent retirees and included the deployment of OnLines, a design research artifact that logged and visualized key online services used by participants at home over four-weeks. The deployment was supported by pre- and post-deployment interviews. OnLines prompted participants' reflection on their patterns of Internet use. Position Exchange Theory was used to understand retirees' sense making from a lifespan perspective, informing the design of supportive online services. This paper delivers a three-fold contribution to the field of human-computer interaction, advancing a lifespan-oriented approach by conceptualizing the self as a dialogical phenomenon that develops over time, advancing the ageing discourse by reporting on retirees' complex identities in the context of their life histories, and advancing discourse on research through design by developing OnLines to foster participant-researcher reflection informed by Self Psychology.

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

Organic User Interfaces (OUIs) are flexible, actuated interfaces characterized by being aesthetically pleasing, intuitively manipulated and ubiquitously embedded in our daily life. In this paper, we critically survey the state-of-the-art for OUIs in interactive architecture research at two levels: 1) Architecture and Landscape; and 2) Interior Design. We postulate that OUIs have specific qualities that offer great potential for building interactive interiors and entire architectures that have the potential to -finally- transform the vision of smart homes and ubiquitous computing environments (calm computing) into reality. We formulate a manifesto for OUI Architecture in both exterior and interior design, arguing that OUIs should be at the core of a new interdisciplinary field driving research and practice in architecture. Based on this research agenda we propose concerted efforts to be made to begin addressing the challenges and opportunities of OUIs. This agenda offers us the strongest means through which to deliver a future of interactive architecture.

Computing has become an established part of the built environment augmenting it to become adaptive.We generally assume that we control the adaptive environments we inhabit.Using an existing adaptive environment prototype, we conducted a controlled study testing how the reversal of control (where the environment attempts to influence the behaviour of the inhabitant) would affect participants.Most participants changed their respiratory behaviour in accordance with this environmental manipulation.Behavioural change occurred either consciously or unconsciously.We explain the two different paths leading participants to behavioural change: (i) we adapt the model of interbodily resonance, a process of bodily interaction observable between, for example, partners engaged in verbal dialogue, to describe the unconscious bodily response to subtle changes in the environment and (ii) we apply the model of secondary control, an adjustment of one's own expectations to maintain the pretence of control, to describe conscious cognitive adaptation to the changing environment.We also discuss potential applications of our findings in therapeutic and other settings. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS• We describe an experimental study of the control relationship in biofeedback environments.• Inhabitants on average synchronize their physiological behaviour when they lose control over the environment.• Inhabitant behaviour is explained through a form of interbodily resonance and secondary control.• We see potential therapeutic uses of combining biofeedback and automated control.

Music listening practices are changing. Mobile, networked devices now offer rich opportunities not just for personal music consumption but also for personally broadcasting music and for sharing digital meta-data concerning tastes, preferences and general listening habits. However, experiences of music listening and sharing on the move and how this has been impacted by developments in mobile technology remain under-explored. In this paper we present an empirical study of the sociality of mobile music experiences, "in the wild", using a new location-based mobile music-sharing application (Pocketsong), designed as a technology probe. We report users' experiences of Pocketsong (distilled from interviews), and critically examine the affordances of mobile music applications, the sociality of sharing and "co-listening", and the relationships between digitally-mediated mobile music consumption and self-expression. Based upon this we reflect upon the interaction design challenges of developing mobile music technologies that work in digitally-mediated social spaces.

Smart journals are both an emerging class of lifelogging applications and novel digital possessions, which are used to create and curate a personal record of one's life. Through an in-depth interview study of analogue and digital journaling practices, and by drawing on a wide range of research around --technologies of memory?, we address fundamental questions about how people manage and value digital records of the past. Appreciating journaling as deeply idiographic, we map a broad range of user practices and motivations and use this understanding to ground four design considerations: recognizing the motivation to account for one's life; supporting the authoring of a unique perspective and finding a place for passive tracking as a chronicle. Finally, we argue that smart journals signal a maturing orientation to issues of digital archiving.

The use of data and metrics on a professional and personal level has led to considerable discourse around the performative power and politics of 'big data' and data visualization, with academia being no exception. We have developed a university system, ResViz, which publicly visualizes the externally funded research projects of academics, and their internal collaborations. We present an interview study that engages 20 key stakeholders, academics and administrators who are part of the pilot release for the first version of this system. In doing so, we describe and problematize our design space, considering the implications of making metrics visible and their social use within a large organization. Our findings cut across the way people communicate, review and manage performance with metrics. We raise seven design issues in this space -- practical considerations that expose the tensions in making metrics available for public contestation.

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

Changing patterns of both work-related mobility and do-mestic arrangements mean that 'mobile workers' face chal-lenges to support and engage in family life whilst travelling for work. Phatic devices offer some potential to provide connection at a distance alongside existing communications infrastructure. Through a bespoke design process, incorpo-rating phases of design ethnography, critical technical prac-tice and provotyping we have developed Ritual Machines I and II as material explorations of mobile workers' lives and practices. In doing this we sought to reflect upon the prac-tices through which families accomplish mobile living, the values they place in technology for doing 'family' at a distance and to draw insights in to the potential roles of digital technology in supporting them. We frame the design of our phatic devices in discussion of processes of bespoke design, offer advice on supporting mobile workers when travelling and articulate the values of making a technology at home when designing for domestic and mobile settings.

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

This article questions how people will interact with a quantified past—the growing historical record generated by the increasing use of sensor-based technologies and, in particular, personal informatics tools. In a qualitative study, we interviewed 15 long-term users of different self-tracking tools about how they encountered and made meaning from historical data they had collected. Our findings highlight that even if few people are self-tracking as a form of deliberate lifelogging, many of them generate data and records that become meaningful digital possessions. These records are revealing of many aspects of people’s lives. Through considerable rhetorical data-work, people can appropriate such records to form highly personal accounts of their pasts. We use our findings to identify six characteristics of a quantified past and map an emerging design space for the long-term and retrospective use of personal informatics. Principally, we propose that design should seek to support people in making account of their data and guard against the assumption that more, or “better,” data will be able to do this for them. To this end, we speculate on design opportunities and challenges for experiencing, curating, and sharing historical personal data in new ways.

Nature Bot is a two-part, interactive art installation that uses technology to facilitate a remote exploration of nature through a remote controlled robot with video link, whilst simultaneously reflecting the exploration through a kinetic reactive sculpture within a local built environment. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) was used to design the system so that it harnesses the beneficial properties of "wild nature." The project presents a unique approach to using technology to mediate a sense of immersive connection to nature, providing the user with agency within an external natural environment. The results of a qualitative user experience study suggest the installation fulfilled the elements of ART necessary for an environment conducive of mental restoration and feelings of wellbeing, and that it reflected a sense of nature within the built environment.

Research on actuated interfaces has shown that people respond in certain socialized ways to interfaces that exhibit autonomous behaviours. We wished to explore the elements of design that drive people to regard an autonomous, interactive system as a social agent. To explore perceptions of autonomous behaviour in interfaces we created Diri - an autonomous helium balloon, used to document activity in spaces. We implemented two different technological sophistications of Diri, to compare the outcomes of our design decisions. We present our design process, technical details and evaluation workshops, concluding with implications for designing for autonomous behaviour in interfaces.

Memorialization is a ubiquitous human practice, which is increasingly intersecting with our digital lives. It is becoming ever more commonplace to see discussions and examples of digital memorials in research literature, technology shows and art galleries. However, the design space for digital memorials has, to date, been little explored. In this paper, we propose an emergent framework for digital memorials, based around notions of actors, inputs, form and message. The framework is grounded in examples of current memorialization practice, and situated within a contextual understanding of memorials as an emergent digital phenomenon within a networked society. In detailing the framework we highlight features of the design space that can be exploited in the development of bespoke memorial technologies, and identify potential areas of future interest that this framework brings to the fore, such as HCI's engagement with critical concepts of the postself and temporality.

Cultural institutions, such as museums, often curate politically and ethically sensitive materials. Increasingly, Internet-enabled, digital technology intersects with these curatorial practices offering new opportunities for public and scholarly engagement. We report on a case study of human rights media archiving at a genocide memorial centre in Rwanda, motivated by our interests in ICT support to memorialisation practices. Through an analysis of our discussions with staff about their work, we report on how accounts of the Rwandan Genocide are being captured and curated to support the centre's humanitarian agenda and associated values. We identify transferable curatorial concerns for human rights media communication amongst scholarly networks and public audiences worldwide, elucidating interaction design challenges for supportive ICT and contributing to HCI discourses on Value Sensitive Design and cultural engagement with sensitive materials.

We describe the design, implementation and deployment of Photobox, a domestic technology that prints four or five randomly selected photos from the owner's Flickr collection at random intervals each month. We deployed Photobox in three homes for fourteen months, to explore how the slow pace at which it operates could support experiences of anticipation and re-visitation of the past. Findings reveal changes in attitude toward the device, from frustration to eventual acceptance. Participants drew on the photos to reflect on past life events and reactions indicated a renewed interest for their Flickr collection. Photobox also provoked reflection on technology in and around the home. These findings suggest several opportunities, such as designing for anticipation, better supporting reflection on the past, and, more generally, expanding the slow technology research program within the HCI community.

The use of autonomous behaviour in Tangible User Interfaces can potentially create a compelling and new kind of interaction between humans and computers. We motivate this argument by reviewing related research, which indicates that people are engaged by apparently autonomous behaviours in tangible objects and apply rules of social behaviour towards these smart objects. Our intention is to leverage this effect in support of human-computer interaction. Rather than aiming to improve user performance, we argue that such interfaces can offer a richer and more enjoyable autonomous interface interaction. Herein we present a framework highlighting key concepts and characteristics which are important while designing and implementing Tangible Autonomous Interfaces.

StoryCrate [2] is a collaborative editing tool developed to drive creative workflow within a location based television production environment. The system was deployed in a real-world context, using professional production staff to produce a short film. In this paper we present an exploration into this deployment using interviews, observations and accounts from the crew. We provide an in-depth analysis of the study and the impact of StoryCrate on the crew's workflow. By providing a narrative of the deployment we describe how it was appropriated in-the-wild, and discuss considerations for designing tools to aid creative professionals in similarly hierarchical domains.

Over a decade ago Hallnäs and Redström's seminal article on Slow Technology [6] argued that the increasing availability of technology in environments outside of the workplace requires interaction design to be expanded from creating tools for making people's lives more efficient to creating technology that could be embedded in everyday environments over long periods of time. Since then, the Slow Technology design agenda has expanded to include issues such as (i) designing for slowness, solitude, and mental rest, (ii) designing interactive systems to be used across multiple generations and lifespans, and (iii) designing for slower, less consumptive lifestyles and practices. This workshop aims to advance the Slow Technology design program by exploring the various practical, methodological and theoretical motivations, challenges, and approaches implicated in doing research and design in this growing space.

We describe the design and implementation of Photobox, a device intended to be used over many years, which occasionally prints a randomly selected photo from the owner's Flickr collection inside of a wooden chest. We describe and reflect on how engaging in the design of this slow technology [5] led to some unexpected challenges and provoked us to re-think approaches to making technologies that are intended to be used over long time scales and which might act infrequently. We also reflect on how living with the device during the implementation phase led to unexpected insights. We conclude with implications for research and practice in the slow technology design space.

This paper describes a field study of an interactive surface deployed in three family homes. The tabletop technology provides a central place where digital content, such as photos, can be easily archived, managed and viewed. The tabletop affords multi-touch input, allowing digital content to be sorted, triaged and interacted with using one or two-handed interactions. A physics-based simulation adds dynamics to digital content, providing users with rich ways of interacting that borrows from the real-world. The field study is one of the first of a surface computer within a domestic environment. Our goal is to uncover people's inter-actions, appropriations, perceptions and experiences with such technologies, exploring the potential barriers to use. Given these devices provide such a revolutionary shift in interaction, will people be able to engage with them in everyday life in the ways we intend? In answering this question, we hope to deepen our understanding of the design of such systems for home and consumer domains.

Material artifacts are passed down as a way of sustaining relationships and family history. However, new issues are emerging as families are increasingly left with the digital remains of their loved ones. We designed three devices to investigate how digital materials might be passed down, lived with and inherited in the future. We conducted in-home interviews with 8 families using the devices to provoke discussion about how technology might support (or complicate) their existing practices. Sessions revealed families desired to treat their archives in ways not fully supported by technology as well as potential tensions that could emerge. Findings are interpreted to detail design considerations for future work in this emerging space.

Artifacts play an important role as triggers for personal memory. They help in the recollection of past experience and in reminiscing about people, places, and times gone by. Of particular interest to us is one type of artifact, the heirloom, which may also have rich connections with memory, but often through the lens of the life of a deceased member of a family, or a friend. Issues of personal memory and heirlooms are complex, diverse, and subtle. In this article we describe a design case study investigating the role technology will play as part of the process of inheritance. We describe the process of translating fieldwork related to artifacts and heirlooms into a design space from which a broad set of themes, concepts and prototypes emerged. We describe the development of this space, its thematic arrangement, and finally a number of resultant artifact designs.

Our surroundings are becoming infused with sensors measuring a variety of data streams about the environment, people and objects. Such data can be used to make the spaces that we inhabit responsive and interactive. Personal data in its different forms are one important data stream that such spaces are designed to respond to. In turn, one stream of personal data currently attracting high levels of interest in the HCI community is physiological data (e.g., heart rate, electrodermal activity), but this has seen little consideration in building architecture or the design of responsive environments. In this context, we developed a prototype mapping a single occupant’s respiration to its size and form, while it also sonifies their heartbeat. The result is a breathing building prototype, formative trials of which suggested that it triggers behavioral and physiological adaptations in inhabitants without giving them instructions and it is perceived as a relaxing experience. In this paper, we present and discuss the results of a controlled study of this prototype, comparing three conditions: the static prototype, regular movement and sonification and a biofeedback condition, where the occupant’s physiological data directly drives the prototype and presents this data back to them. The study confirmed that the biofeedback condition does indeed trigger behavioral changes and changes in participants’ physiology, resulting in lower respiration rates as well as higher respiration amplitudes, respiration to heart rate coherence and lower frequency heart rate variability. Self-reported state of relaxation is more dependent on inhabitant preferences, their knowledge of physiological data and whether they found space to ‘let go’. We conclude with a discussion of ExoBuilding as an immersive but also sharable biofeedback training interface and the wider potential of this approach to making buildings adapt to their inhabitants.

Automics is a photo-souvenir service which utilises mobile devices to support the capture, sharing and annotation of digital images amongst groups of visitors to theme parks. The prototype service mixes individual and group photo-capture with existing in-park, on-ride photo services, to allow users to create printed photo-stories. Herein we discuss initial fieldwork in theme parks that grounded the design of Automics, our development of the service prototype, and its real-world evaluation with theme park visitors. We relate our findings on user experience of the service to a literature on mobile photoware, finding implications for the design of souvenir services.

Examining developmental periods of the human lifespan has been a useful tradition for focusing HCI research (e.g., technologies for children or the elderly). In this paper, we identify the end of life as another period of the human lifespan that merits consideration by technology designers and researchers. This paper maps out current and future research in HCI at the end of life by first describing how this area raises questions concerning materiality and artifacts, social identities, temporality and methodologies. Having provided a description of the richness of this area, we then frame it against HCI traditions and practices in an orientation we term the lifespan-oriented approach. This paper maps early efforts in end of life research, structures and suggests areas for continued work, and situates the end of life among existing areas of HCI research.

Lifelogging technologies can capture both mundane and important experiences in our daily lives, resulting in a rich record of the places we visit and the things we see. This study moves beyond technology demonstrations, in aiming to better understand how and why different types of Lifelogs aid memory. Previous work has demonstrated that Lifelogs can aid recall, but that they do many other things too. They can help us look back at the past in new ways, or to reconstruct what we did in our lives, even if we don't recall exact details. Here we extend the notion of Lifelogging to include locational information. We augment streams of Lifelog images with geographic data to examine how different types of data (visual or locational) might affect memory. Our results show that visual cues promote detailed memories (akin to recollection). In contrast locational information supports inferential processes -- allowing participants to reconstruct habits in their behaviour.

While it can be a delicate and emotionally-laden topic, new technological trends compel us to confront a range of problems and issues about death and bereavement. This area presents complex challenges and the associated literature is extensive. In this paper we offer a way of slicing through several perspectives in the social sciences to see clearly a set of salient issues related to bereavement. Following this, we present a theoretical lens to provide a way of conceptualizing how the HCI community could begin to approach such issues. We then report field evidence from 11 in-depth interviews conducted with bereaved participants and apply the proposed lens to unpack key emergent problems and tensions. We conclude with a discussion on how the HCI design space might be sensitized to better support the social processes that unfold when bereavement occurs.

We present an experimental comparison of multi-touch and tangible user interfaces for basic interface actions. Twelve participants completed manipulation and acquisition tasks on an interactive surface in each of three conditions: tangible user interface; multi-touch; and mouse and puck. We found that interface control objects in the tangible condition were easiest to acquire and, once acquired, were easier/more accurate to manipulate. Further qualitative analysis suggested that in the evaluated tasks tangibles offer greater adaptability of control and specifically highlighted a problem of exit error that can undermine fine-grained control in multi-touch interactions. We discuss the implications of these findings for interface design.

Nowadays it has become increasingly common for family members to be distributed in different time zones. These time differences pose specific challenges for communication within the family and result in different communication practices to cope with them. To gain an understanding of current challenges and practices, we interviewed people who regularly communicate with immediate family members living in other time zones. We report primary findings from the interviews, and identify design opportunities for improving the experience of cross time zone family communication.

The Family Archive device is an interactive multi-touch tabletop technology with integrated capture facility for the archiving of sentimental artefacts and memorabilia. It was developed as a technology probe to help us open up current family archiving practices and to explore family archiving in situ. We detail the deployment and study of three of these devices in family homes and discuss how deploying a new, potentially disruptive, technology can foreground the social relations and organizing systems in domestic life. This in turn facilitates critical reflection on technology design.

Video-mediated communication (VMC) technologies are becoming rapidly adopted by home users. Little research has previously been conducted into why home users would choose to use VMC or their practices surrounding its use. We present the results of an interview and diary-based study of 17 people about their uses of, and attitudes towards, VMC. We highlight the artful ways in which users appropriate VMC to reconcile a desire for closeness with those with whom they communicate, and we explore the rich ways in which VMC supports different expressions of this desire. We conclude with discussions of how next-generation VMC technologies might be designed to take advantage of this understanding of human values in communicative practice.

tutorial Share on Connecting families: new technologies, family communication, and the impact on domestic space Authors: Carman Neustaedter Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, Canada Simon Fraser University, Surrey, BC, CanadaView Profile , Tejinder K. Judge Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USAView Profile , Steve Harrison Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USAView Profile , Abigail Sellen Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United KingdomView Profile , Xiang Cao Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom Microsoft Research Cambridge, Cambridge, United KingdomView Profile , David Kirk University of Nottingham University of NottinghamView Profile , Joseph Kaye Nokia Research Nokia ResearchView Profile Authors Info & Claims GROUP '10: Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group workNovember 2010 Pages 363–366https://doi.org/10.1145/1880071.1880152Online:07 November 2010Publication History 8citation633DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations8Total Downloads633Last 12 Months38Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Creating digital archives of personal and family artifacts is an area of growing interest, but which seemingly is often not supported by a thorough understanding of current home archiving practice. In this article we seek to excavate the home archive, exploring those things that people choose to keep rather than simply accumulate. Based on extensive field research in family homes we present an investigation of the kinds of sentimental objects, both physical and digital, to be found in homes, and through in-depth interviews with family members we explore the values behind archiving practices, explaining why and how sentimental artefacts are kept. In doing this we wish to highlight the polysemous nature of things and to argue that archiving practice in the home is not solely concerned with the invocation of memory. In support of this we show how sentimental artifacts are also used to connect with others, to define the self and the family, to fulfill obligations and, quite conversely to efforts of remembering, to safely forget. Such values are fundamental to family life where archiving takes place and consequently we explore how home archiving is achieved as a familial practice in the negotiated spaces of the home. From this grounded understanding of existing practices and values, in context, we derive requirements and implications for the design of future forms of domestic archiving technology.

In this paper we discuss some of our recent research work designing tabletop interfaces for co-located photo sharing. We draw particular attention to a specific feature of an interface design, which we have observed over an extensive number of uses, as facilitating an under-reported but none-the-less intriguing aspect of the photo-sharing experience - namely the process of 'getting sidetracked'. Through a series of vignettes of interaction during photo-sharing sessions we demonstrate how users of our tabletop photoware system used peripheral presentation of topically incoherent photos to artfully initiate new photo-talk sequences in on-going discourse. From this we draw implications for the design of tabletop photo applications, and for the experiential analysis of such devices.

In this paper we describe VPlay, a multi-touch tabletop application that allows users to mix and manipulate multiple video streams in real-time. Our aim is to explore how such an interactive surface can support and augment practices around VJing - a form of video performance art that is becoming increasingly popular in nightclubs and other music events. We conclude with observations from a field deployment, which highlight some initial thoughts and reflections on our design rationale.

In this paper we investigate tangible interaction on interactive tabletops. These afford the support and integration of physical artefacts for the manipulation of digital media. To inform the design of interfaces for interactive surfaces we think it is necessary to deeply understand the benefits of employing such physical handles, i.e., the benefits of employing a third spatial dimension at the point of interaction.To this end we conducted an experimental study by designing and comparing two versions of an interactive tool on a tabletop display, one with a physical 3D handle, and one purely graphical (but direct touch enabled). Whilst hypothesizing that the 3D version would provide a number of benefits, our observations revealed that users developed diverse interaction approaches and attitudes about hybrid and direct touch interaction.

This paper explores the intersection of emerging surface technologies, capable of sensing multiple contacts and of-ten shape information, and advanced games physics engines. We define a technique for modeling the data sensed from such surfaces as input within a physics simulation. This affords the user the ability to interact with digital objects in ways analogous to manipulation of real objects. Our technique is capable of modeling both multiple contact points and more sophisticated shape information, such as the entire hand or other physical objects, and of mapping this user input to contact forces due to friction and collisions within the physics simulation. This enables a variety of fine-grained and casual interactions, supporting finger-based, whole-hand, and tangible input. We demonstrate how our technique can be used to add real-world dynamics to interactive surfaces such as a vision-based tabletop, creating a fluid and natural experience. Our approach hides from application developers many of the complexities inherent in using physics engines, allowing the creation of applications without preprogrammed interaction behavior or gesture recognition.

Remote gesture systems have been shown to provide a significant enhancement to performance in collaborative physical tasks, an effect ascribed to the ability of remote gestures to help ground deictic references. The argument that this effect works by replacing complex referential descriptions with simple pointing behaviours has been drawn into question by recent research. In this paper we significantly unpack the effects of remote gesturing on collaborative language, arguing for a more complex role for remote gestures in interaction. We demonstrate how remote gestures influence the structure of collaborative discourse, and how their use can also influence the temporal nature of the grounding process. Through generating a deeper understanding of these effects of remote gesturing on collaborative language we derive implications for the development and deployment of these technologies.

In this paper we elucidate the patterns of behavior of home movie makers through a study of 12 families and a separate focus group of 7 teenagers. Analogous to a similar study of photowork [13], the goal is to provide a deeper understanding of what people currently do with video technologies, balancing the preponderence of techno-centric work in the area with appropriate user-centric insight. From our analysis, we derive a videowork lifecycle to frame the practices users engage in when working with video technologies in the home, and uncover two broad types of video usage therein. This has implications for how we conceive of and devise tools to support these practices, as we discuss.

This work presents the results of a comparative study in which we investigate the ways manipulation of physical versus digital media are fundamentally different from one another. Participants carried out both a puzzle task and a photo sorting task in two different modes: in a physical 3-dimensional space and on a multi-touch, interactive tabletop in which the digital items resembled their physical counterparts in terms of appearance and behavior. By observing the interaction behaviors of 12 participants, we explore the main differences and discuss what this means for designing interactive surfaces which use aspects of the physical world as a design resource.

The design of remote gesturing technologies is an area of growing interest. Current technologies have taken differing approaches to the representation of remote gesture. It is not clear which approach has the most benefit to task performance. This study therefore compared performance in a collaborative physical (assembly) task using remote gesture systems constructed with combinations of three different gesture formats (unmediated hands only, hands and sketch and digital sketch only) and two different gesture output locations (direct projection into a worker's task space or on an external monitor). Results indicated that gesturing with an unmediated representation of the hands leads to faster performance with no loss of accuracy. Comparison of gesture output locations did not find a significant difference between projecting gestures and presenting them on external monitors. These results are discussed in relation to theories of conversational grounding and the design of technologies from a 'mixed ecologies' perspective.

In this paper we introduce the notion of "photowork" as the activities people perform with their digital photos after cap-ture but prior to end use such as sharing. Surprisingly, these processes of reviewing, downloading, organizing, editing, sorting and filing have received little attention in the litera-ture yet they form the context for a large amount of the 'search' and 'browse' activities so commonly referred to in studies of digital photo software. Through a deeper under-standing of photowork using field observation and inter-views, we seek to highlight its significance as an interaction practice. At the same time, we discover how "search" as it is usually defined may have much less relevance than new ways of browsing for the design of new digital photo tools, in particular, browsing in support of the photowork activi-ties we describe.