Smart garments and circular-economy endeavours nurture imaginaries of sustainable futures. However, these trends’ intersection involves privacy risks: when the smart garments are recycled, their biometric data should be erased, to protect earlier users’ privacy. Unfortunately, this data erasure may not always occur. To examine privacy perceptions connected with reused smart garments, we conducted a two-week speculative enactment, preceded with systemic future scenario development. Eight participants wore a reused smart shirt prototype that seemed to leak a prior user’s data. The participants initially disregarded privacy problems associated with smart-garment reuse but changed their perceptions upon recognising risks of surveillance and of private data’s disclosure to the garment’s future users. Discussing the systemic future scenarios with participants spotlighted implications for future privacy related to data ownership, the digital divide, and environmental authoritarianism. These findings call for anticipatory approaches that heighten sensitivity to uncertainty and implicit assumptions in researching privacy in possible futures.

Long-distance relationships (LDRs) struggle to sustain intimacy without physical touch. Existing mediated social touch systems rely on designer-authored haptic patterns, which limit opportunities for personalization and shared meaning-making. We present Onni, a haptic interface that lets couples collaboratively define and experience a shared library of haptic interactions. In Study 1, we conducted co-creation workshops (n = 20) to examine how couples negotiate and align meanings in haptic interactions. In Study 2, we deployed Onni in everyday routines (n = 6) to explore how these interactions are adopted, adapted, and ritualized. Our findings illustrate that couples co-create and personalize haptic interactions through continuous exploration, negotiation, and situational adaptation. By integrating a dyadic co-design approach, an end-user authoring interface for a shared action–feedback haptic repertoire, and a longitudinal view of how meanings evolve in everyday LDR routines, this work advances the understanding of haptic meaning-making as a collaboratively constructed and ritualized process. It offers concrete design implications for building personalized, evolving haptic systems that support intimacy in LDRs.

| openaire: EC/HE/101070533/EU//EMIL

Plausible findings about futures are inherently difficult to obtain as they require critical, well-informed speculations backed with data. HCI scholars tackle this challenge via user studies wherein futuristic prototypes and other props concretise possible futures for participants. By observing participants’ actions, researchers then can ‘time travel’ to see that future as reality, in action. However, such studies may yield particularised findings, inherent to study’s intricacies, and lack broader plausibility. This paper suggests that triangulation of possible futures may help researchers disentangle particularities from more generalisable findings. We explored this approach by conducting a study on two alternative futures of AI-augmented knowledge work. Some findings emerged in both futures while others were particular to only one or the other. This approach enabled cross-checking of plausibility and simultaneously afforded deeper insight. The paper discusses how triangulating possible futures renders HCI studies more future-proof and provides means for reflective anticipation of possible futures.

HCI is future-oriented by nature: it explores new human--technology interactions and applies the findings to promote and shape vital visions of society. Still, the visions of futures in HCI publications seem largely implicit, techno-deterministic, narrow, and lacking in roadmaps and attention to uncertainties. A literature review centered on this problem examined futuring and its forms in the ACM Digital Library's most frequently cited HCI publications. This analysis entailed developing the four-category framework SPIN, informed by futures studies literature. The results confirm that, while technology indeed drives futuring in HCI, a growing body of HCI research is coming to challenge techno-centric visions. Emerging foci of HCI futuring demonstrate active exploration of uncertainty, a focus on human experience, and contestation of dominant narratives. The paper concludes with insight illuminating factors behind techno-centrism's continued dominance of HCI discourse, as grounding for five opportunities for the field to expand its contribution to futures and anticipation research.

Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is transforming numerous professions, not least various fields intimately relying on creativity, such as design. To explore GAI’s adoption and appropriation in design, an interview-based study probed 10 specialists in user experience and industrial design, with varying tenure and GAI experience, for their adoption/application of GAI tools, reasons for not using them, problems with ownership and agency, speculations about the future of creative work, and GAI tools’ roles in design sensemaking. Insight from reflexive thematic analysis revealed wide variation in attitudes toward GAI tools – from threat-oriented negative appraisals to identification of empowerment opportunities – which depended on the sense of agency and perceived control. The paper examines this finding in light of the Coping Model of User Adaptation and discusses designers’ metacognitive skills as possible underpinnings for their attitudes. Avenues for further research are identified accordingly.

In HCI and design research, it has recently been suggested that, instead of risks and threats, uncertainties can be generative resources. This aligns particularly well with practice-based design research and research through design (RtD), where uncertainties are pervasive and unavoidable due to the approach’s interest in open-ended problems, contexts under transformation and unknown futures. Building on the idea that uncertainties drive design activity, we describe the design process as framing acts where a designer-researcher moves along perceived uncertainties. We identify three dynamics for a generative mode of working with uncertainties that can make designers aware of uncertainties, circle in towards those that appear essential while seeking to avoid others and stay with those that offer new perspectives. We exemplify these dynamics by drawing from our experiences from three RtD projects and highlight this viewpoint’s value in providing new reflective tools for designer-researchers.

Disruptive behavior is a prevalent threat to constructive online engagement. Covert behaviors, such as trolling, are especially challenging to detect automatically, because they utilize deceptive strategies to manipulate conversation. We illustrate a novel approach to their detection: analyzing conversational structures instead of focusing only on messages in isolation. Building on conversation analysis, we demonstrate that (1) conversational actions and their norms provide concepts for a deeper understanding of covert disruption, and that (2) machine learning, natural language processing and structural analysis of conversation can complement message-level features to create models that surpass earlier approaches to trolling detection. Our models, developed for detecting overt (aggression) as well as covert (trolling) behaviors using prior studies’ message-level features and new conversational action features, achieved high accuracies (0.90 and 0.92, respectively). The findings offer a theoretically grounded approach to computationally analyzing social media interaction and novel methods for effectively detecting covert disruptive conversations online.

Most textiles in day-to-day use are products of weaving. The versatility of this manufacturing technique, which readily supports a multi-layered structure, inclusion of several yarn types, malleability and other valuable characteristics, has attracted attention from HCI researchers intrigued by its potential to expand the interaction capabilities of e-textiles. Research nonetheless has barely scratched the surface of the wealth of weaving techniques and woven structures available. Therefore, a design-research project anchored in practice investigated how touch-sensitive e-textiles’ capabilities might be enriched via advanced multi-layer weaving techniques. The research process, which drew inspiration from literature both on textile design and on woven e-textiles, produced 25 distinct e-textile samples. Results from evaluating the structural properties, electrical capabilities and overall utility of each point to numerous unexplored opportunities from woven multi-layer e-textiles. Even holding potential for entirely new forms of interaction, these represent promising starting points for in-depth investigation.

Global and systemic sustainability challenges increasingly require innovation teams to incorporate holistic, long-term thinking into their ideation. Since a comprehensive foresight process would prove too burdensome, faster methods are needed. The Future Ripples method was devised to meet this need through reflective practice in four consecutive workshops. It builds on the well-known Futures Wheel foresight method, which offers a collaborative process for brainstorming consequences and impacts. Additionally, the new approach encompasses scanning for weak signals and trends while catering to innovation teams. Analysis of the workshop activities and outcomes suggests that the Future Ripples method can nurture the anticipation skills of innovation teams and help them develop diverse, novel, yet plausible futures. The paper also discusses the role of reflection, metaphors, and the balance between critical and creative thinking in developing holistic futures.

End-user-programmable smart-home toolkits have engendered excitement in recent years. However, modern homes already cater quite well to users’ needs, and genuinely new needs for smart-home automation seldom arise. Acknowledging this challenging starting point, we conducted a six-week in-the-wild study of smart-home toolkits with four carefully recruited technology-savvy families. Interleaved with free toolkit use in the home were several creativity workshops to facilitate ideation and programming. We evaluated use experiences at the end of the six weeks. Even with extensive facilitation, families faced difficulties in identifying needs for smart-home automation, except for social needs that emerged in all the families. We present analysis of those needs and discuss how end-user-programmable toolkits could better engage with both those household members who design new automated functions and those who merely ‘use’ them.

Abstract Internet trolling, a form of antisocial online behavior, is a serious problem plaguing social media. Skillful trolls can lure entire communities into degenerative and polarized discussions that continue endlessly. From analysis of data gathered in accordance with established classifications of trolling-like behavior, the paper presents a conversation analysis of trolling-like interaction strategies that disrupt online discussions. The authors argue that troll-like users exploit other users’ desire for common grounding – i.e., joint maintenance of mutual understanding and seeking of conversational closure – by responding asymmetrically. Their responses to others deviate from expectations for typical paired actions in turn-taking. These asymmetries, described through examples of three such behaviors – ignoring, mismatching, and challenging – lead to dissatisfactory interactions, in that they subvert other users’ desire for clarification and explanation of contra-normative social behavior. By avoiding clarifications, troll-like users easily capture unsuspecting users’ attention and manage to prolong futile conversations interminably. Through the analysis, the paper connects trolling-like asymmetric response strategies with concrete data and addresses the implications of this nonconformist behavior for common grounding in social-media venues.

Digital tools for collocated synchronous communication, like backchannels and question management systems, are increasingly used in events and education to support interaction between performer(s) and audience. Discussions in the communication tool are prone to various unexpected interruptions which violate against the communication tools' original purpose, i.e. violating performers' expected norms. We study such norm violations and related performers' coping approaches in two 15-week-long field experiments in two elementary schools. Our results demonstrate how the collocated synchronous tools form dual-channel communication environment where both physical and digital channel are in use at the same time. We show how norm violations 'spill over' from their onset in one channel to continue in the other. However, we observed performers coping approaches were primarily focused in the physical channel. This resulted in an asymmetry of presence and delayed the performers' ability to act on violations. Our findings show that the channels in dual-channel communication are tightly interwoven and must be considered as an integrated communication space instead of two co-occurring but separate channels. We provide a framework to study norm violations and discuss implications of this framework on the design of these systems.

Enrollment in online courses has sharply increased in higher education. Although online education can be scaled to large audiences, the lack of interaction between educators and learners is difficult to replace and remains a primary challenge in the field. Conversational agents may alleviate this problem by engaging in natural interaction and by scaffolding learners' understanding similarly to educators. However, whether this approach can also be used to enrich online video lectures has largely remained unknown. We developed Sara, a conversational agent that appears during an online video lecture. She provides scaffolds by voice and text when needed and includes a voice-based input mode. An evaluation with 182 learners in a 2 x 2 lab experiment demonstrated that Sara, compared to more traditional conversational agents, significantly improved learning in a programming task. This study highlights the importance of including scaffolding and voice-based conversational agents in online videos to improve meaningful learning.

Among the defining characteristics of a healthy research discipline is the ability to correct its knowledge if more recent evidence creates grounds for this. Studies that reveal errors in earlier theories demonstrate, in line with Karl Popper’s thinking, an approach called falsificationism. They complement approaches aimed at developing and expanding knowledge by generalising empirical observations or postulating new contributions and testing them. The paper presents an analysis that applies this categorisation to abstracts of research papers (N = 5,202) in the eight leading IS journals. Machine-learning-based classification determined that only 7.0% of the papers manifested any clear form of knowledge-contestation, such as falsification, in the approach or findings presented. In light of this, we call on IS researchers to increase the falsification and knowledge-contestation in their research, to nurture more valid theories, methods, and practices, thereby achieving greater societal impact. We present two suitable IS research designs accordingly: knowledge-contesting comparisons and knowledge-contesting replications. We also discuss how these designs, exemplifying opportunities to increase the number of knowledge-contesting studies in the field, can be applied in both positivist and interpretivist research epistemology.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools are used to increase social interaction in collocated settings. Recent research has been primarily constructive (oriented to building of systems) or phenomenon-driven (serving attempts to understand interactions in collocated CMC). The paper contributes a theory-driven approach and examines collocated CMC as a Habermasean "public sphere": a space that supports inclusive, civil, and rational discussion. An in-the-wild experimental study comparing CMC with face-to-face (F2F) communication enabled ascertaining that CMC is more inclusive than F2F communication. Respectfulness levels did not differ but were established differently: via collective construction of a common narrative in F2F and through quick reactions in CMC. Similarly, while rationality figures were on a par, F2F communication allowed participants to justify their claims better. The article discusses how a theory-based approach can strengthen phenomenon-driven research with new conceptual frames and measurement tools, and steer constructive research with a normative framework.

There is a blind spot in HCI's evaluation methodology: we rarely consider the implications of the fact that a prototype can never be fully evaluated in a study. A prototype under study exists firmly in the present world, in the circumstances created in the study, but its real context of use is a partially unknown future state of affairs. This present-future gap is implicit in any evaluation of prototypes, be they usability tests, controlled experiments, or field trials. A carelessly designed evaluation may inadvertently evaluate the wrong futures, contexts, or user groups, thereby leading to false conclusions and expensive design failures. The essay analyses evaluation methodology from this perspective, illuminating how to mitigate the present-future gap.

Tools for supporting performer-audience interaction have been gaining increasing interest in HCI community recently. They encompass a wide range of systems from simple polls to live tweeting and backchannel chats. However, a lack of unifying conceptual framework hampers their efficient development and deployment in events. In this paper, we develop a notion of live participation and present a live participation system that aims to capture performer-audience interaction systems' salient design-relevant characteristics. With user studies, we identify central characteristics of live participation (RQ1) and explore the diversity of types of live participation situations (RQ2). The identified concepts-extended performance, integration work, and episodes-provide the groundwork for further design of live participation systems and more engaging audience interactions.

We present PromotionRank, a technique for generating a personalized ranking of grocery product promotions based on the contents of the customer’s personal shopping list. PromotionRank consists of four phases. First, information retrieval techniques are used to map shopping list items onto potentially relevant product categories. Second, since customers typically buy more items than what appear on their shopping lists, the set of potentially relevant categories is expanded using collaborative filtering. Third, we calculate a rank score for each category using a statistical interest criterion. Finally, the available promotions are ranked using the newly computed rank scores. To validate the different phases, we consider 12 months of anonymized shopping basket data from a large national supermarket. To demonstrate the effectiveness of PromotionRank, we also present results from two user studies. The first user study was conducted in a controlled setting using shopping lists of different lengths, whereas the second study was conducted within a large national supermarket using real customers and their personal shopping lists. The results of the two studies demonstrate that PromotionRank is able to identify promotions that are considered both relevant and interesting. As part of the second study, we used PromotionRank to identify relevant promotions to advertise and measure the influence of the advertisements on purchases. The results of this evaluation indicate that PromotionRank is also capable of targeting advertisements, improving sales compared to a baseline that selects random advertisements.

Media creation applications cater poorly to one very common usage: Situations in which the users need media that they do not own and for which they are unwilling to pay. Finding and using externally produced media is currently a cumbersome process. Often, users locate the content using a search engine, copy it into their work, cross their fingers, and hope they do not infringe on any copyrights. While the authors have shared hundreds of millions of images with permissive licenses, the license terms are too complicated for other users to follow. In our studies, we found that even the well-intentioned users still fail to respect copyrights in simple image reuse situations. We therefore introduce an Open Media Retrieval (OMR) model to remedy this problem and supplement it with prototypes that access various legal image sources directly within the creative work flow and provide automatic credits to the original authors.

We present Ma$$iv€, an intelligent mobile grocery assistant that provides support for the customer during the entire shopping process. To guide the design of Ma$$iv€, we conducted a user study that explored customer preferences regarding features in a mobile grocery aid. We first describe the study and its results, after which we introduce the design principles and design of Ma$$iv€. We also describe the features that Ma$$iv€ supports and discuss functionalities that we are integrating into Ma$$iv€. As part of the discussion, we describe technical challenges that we have encountered during our development efforts.

Visual search in large real-world scenes is both time consuming and frustrating, because the search becomes serial when items are visually similar. Tactile guidance techniques can facilitate search by allowing visual attention to focus on a subregion of the scene. We present a technique for dynamic tactile cueing that couples hand position with a scene position and uses tactile feedback to guide the hand actively toward the target. We demonstrate substantial improvements in task performance over a baseline of visual search only, when the scene's complexity increases. Analyzing task performance, we demonstrate that the effect of visual complexity can be practically eliminated through improved spatial precision of the guidance.

Using landmark-based navigation instructions is widely considered to be the most effective strategy for presenting navigation instructions. Among other things, landmark-based instructions can reduce the user's cognitive load, increase confidence in navigation decisions and reduce the number of navigational errors. Their main disadvantage is that the user typically focuses considerable amount of attention on searching for landmark points, which easily results in poor awareness of the user's surroundings. In indoor spaces, this implies that landmark-based instructions can reduce the attention the user pays on advertisements and commercial displays, thus rendering the assistance commercially inviable. To better understand how landmark-based instructions influence the user's awareness of her surroundings, we conducted a user study with $20$ participants in a large national supermarket that investigated how the attention the user pays on her surroundings varies across two types of landmark-based instructions that vary in terms of their visual demand. The results indicate that an increase in the visual demand of landmark-based instructions does not necessarily improve the participant's recall of their surrounding environment and that this increase can cause a decrease in navigation efficiency. The results also indicate that participants generally pay little attention to their surroundings and are more likely to rationalize than to actually remember much from their surroundings. Implications of the findings on navigation assistants are discussed.

We know that phone calls and mobile text messages are not always promptly answered and responded to, yet we know little about the reasons for unavailability, its effects on a user's image, the ways in which users explain the reasons for it, and actions when users cannot reach someone. Usage logs (2,983 phone use events), Web-based diaries, and interviews (N = 20) were used to investigate occasional unavailability in a mobile communication context. We identified four categories of unavailability and found that 31.1% of the phone calls consisted of unsuccessful communication attempts and reciprocal calls back from people who were unavailable earlier. Interestingly, while participants paid attention to the need to give reasons for unavailability, they did not require the explanations to be truthful. These findings have implications for design of systems that better support the needs to manage and explain unavailability and manage pending communication requests.

Control centers in large-scale events entail heterogeneous combinations of off-the-shelf and proprietary systems built into ordinary rooms, and in this respect they place themselves in an interesting contrast to more permanent control rooms with custom-made systems and a large number of operational procedures. In this article we ask how it is possible for a control center that is seemingly so “ad hoc” in nature to achieve a remarkable safety level in the face of many safety-critical incidents. We present analyses of data collected in two FIA World Rally Championships events. The results highlight three aspects of the workers' practices: (a) the practice of making use of redundancy in technologically mediated representations, (b) the practice of updating the intersubjective understanding of the incident status through verbal coordination, and (c) the practice of reacting immediately to emergency messages even without a comprehensive view of the situation, and gradually iterating one's hypothesis to correct the action. This type of collaborative setting imposes special demands to support the practices of absorbing, translating, and manipulating incoming information.

Repurposive appropriation is a creative everyday act in which a user invents a novel use for information technology (IT) and adopts it. This study is the first to address its prevalence and predictability in the consumer IT context. In all, 2,379 respondents filled in an online questionnaire on creative uses of digital cameras, such as using them as scanners, periscopes, and storage media. The data reveal that such creative uses are adopted by about half of the users, on average, across different demographic backgrounds. Discovery of a creative use on one's own is slightly more common than is learning it from others. Most users discover the creative uses either completely on their own or wholly through learning from others. Our regression model explains 34% of the variance in adoption of invented uses, with technology cognizance orientation, gender, exploration orientation, use frequency, and use tenure as the strongest predictors. These findings have implications for both design and marketing.

We present data from detailed observations of CityWall, a large multi-touch display installed in a central location in Helsinki, Finland. During eight days of installation, 1199 persons interacted with the system in various social configurations. Videos of these encounters were examined qualitatively as well as quantitatively based on human coding of events. The data convey phenomena that arise uniquely in public use: crowding, massively parallel interaction, teamwork, games, negotiations of transitions and handovers, conflict management, gestures and overt remarks to co-present people, and "marking" the display for others. We analyze how public availability is achieved through social learning and negotiation, why interaction becomes performative and, finally, how the display restructures the public space. The multi-touch feature, gesture-based interaction, and the physical display size contributed differentially to these uses. Our findings on the social organization of the use of public displays can be useful for designing such systems for urban environments.

Previous attempts to support spectators at large-scale events have concentrated separately on real-time event information, awareness cues, or media-sharing applications. CoMedia combines a group media space with event information and integrates reusable awareness elements throughout. In two field trials, one at a rally and the other at a music festival, we found that CoMedia facilitated onsite reporting to offsite members, coordination of group action, keeping up to date with others, spectating remotely, and joking. In these activities, media, awareness cues, and event information were often used in concert, albeit assuming differing roles. We show that the integrated approach better supports continuous interweaving of use with the changing interests and occurrences in large-scale events.

Technologies can be used - or appropriated - in different ways by different users, but how do the use patterns evolve, and how can design facilitate such evolution? This paper approaches these questions in light of a case study in which a group of 8 high school students used Comeks, a mobile comic strip creator that enables users to exchange rich, expressive multimedia messages. A qualitative analysis of the use processes shows how users turned the functionalities embodied in Comeks into particular resources for communication during the 9-week trial period. The paper discusses the relationship of functionalities of the artifact and the development of resources by presenting how functionalities can be designed to support three ways to appropriate communication technologies: increasing technical mastery, re-channeling existing communication into the new medium and inventing new communicative acts between users.

Most large public displays have been used for providing information to passers-by with the primary purpose of acting as one-way information channels to individual users. We have developed a large public display to which users can send their own media content using mobile devices. The display supports multi-touch interaction, thus enabling collaborative use of the display. This display called CityWall was set up in a city center with the goal of showing information of events happening in the city. We observed two user groups who used mobile phones with upload capability during two large-scale events happening in the city. Our findings are that this kind of combined use of personal mobile devices and a large public display as a publishing forum, used collaboratively with other users, creates a unique setting that extends the group's feeling of participation in the events. We substantiate this claim with examples from user data.

Traditionally, mobile media sharing and messaging has been studied from the perspective of an individual author making media available to other users. With the aim of supporting spectator groups at large-scale events, we developed a messaging application for camera phones with the idea of collectively created albums called Media Stories. The field trial at a rally competition pointed out the collective and participative practices involved in the creation and sense-making of media, challenging the view of individual authorship. Members contributed actively to producing chains of messages in Media Stories, with more than half of the members as authors on average in each story. Observations indicate the centrality of collocated viewing and creation in the use of media. Design implications include providing a ""common space"" and possibilities of creating collective objects, adding features that enrich collocated collective use, and supporting the active construction of awareness and social presence through the created media.

In this paper we present MAR (Mobile Augmented Reality) Toolkit as an easy-to-use augmented reality toolset for building multi-user mobile phone games. It is built on top of MUPE - Nokia-developed open source mobile platform based on Java - which considers the special qualities of mobile technology. MAR Toolkit contains four components, map interface (MAP), physical object tagger (POT), public display (PUD) and silent communicator (SIC).We have successfully demonstrated MAR Toolkit by implementing a game named as Mupeland Yard based on classical board game Scotland Yard. In user testing we found that common usability issues related to mobile technology and MUPE-platform troubled the tests. However, especially POT component raised interest among developers. We found that using graphical 2D-tags for providing location information for augmented reality games is a simple and robust alternative for more technology intensive GPS and cell-ID information.

Interesting characteristics of large-scale events are their spatial distribution, their extended duration over days, and the fact that they are set apart from daily life. The increasing pervasiveness of computational media encourages us to investigate such unexplored domains, especially when thinking of applications for spectator groups. Here we report of a field study on two groups of rally spectators who were equipped with multimedia phones, and we present a novel mobile group media application called mGroup that supports groups in creating and sharing experiences. Particularly, we look at the possibilities of and boundary conditions for computer applications posed by our findings on group identity and formation, group awareness and coordination, the meaningful construction of an event experience and its grounding in the event context, the shared context and discourses, protagonism and active spectatorship. Moreover, we aim at providing a new perspective on spectatorship at large scale events, which can make research and development more aware of the socio-cultural dimension.