Rural areas play a critical yet under-examined role in the transition toward more sustainable food environments. As design settings, they are shaped by interconnected barriers of mobility, infrastructure, and social coordination that can be difficult to make sense of and address for HCI research. Building on participatory design, we conducted participatory mapping with members of communities of practice from a rural area in Germany. We used participatory mapping within a future workshop to make food environments and the barriers and enablers shaping them visible and negotiable as design material. Based on our findings, we contribute insights into participatory mapping as a method for documenting local food environments at multiple, intertwined layers, and analyze its potential for creating a shared, situational understanding of how sustainable food practices are enabled and constrained.

Consumers use online reviews to decide which products to purchase. Cybercriminals produce fake reviews to influence unknowing consumers into buying products of lower quality, which can lead to financial, emotional and physical damage. However, there is still limited understanding of how consumers assess the veracity of online reviews, or incorporate online reviews into purchasing decisions, especially outside of laboratory settings. Therefore, this study uses a grounded theory approach to explore how consumers determine the veracity and trustworthiness of online user reviews. Twenty-five interviews with consumers were held to identify veracity cues, thought processes and other markers of online shopping behaviour. The results show that consumers use online reviews differently depending on context (e.g. product value, consumer knowledge). Our findings support the development of a theory suggesting that consumers evaluate reviews through a two-step process. First, consumers scan the review for relevance and then subsequently evaluate trustworthiness, credibility, and veracity. The different deception cues that are used by consumers are also identified and classified. These findings offer new insights of how consumers identify fake reviews online.

Abstract Managing private life and household affairs requires considerable work for consumer households, sometimes in cooperation with private companies or public administrations. In their role as consumers/citizens, people must perform work such as monitoring and managing supplies and contracts, comparing and purchasing offers, submitting insurance claims, or renewing passports. While some CSCW studies have examined intra-household coordination work, this study investigates the emerging role of intermediary firms that perform inter-organizational work on behalf of, and driven by, consumers in areas such as finance, insurance, utilities, healthcare, and general administration. Employing qualitative methods, we combined interviews and artifact analysis with five intermediary firms across different sectors and conducted a week-long field study with one of them. In doing so, our study sheds light on intermediaries’ largely hidden role in bridging inter-organizational cooperation in consumer markets. We show to what extent this work involves predominantly human, manual bridging efforts. All five intermediaries face (common) social-level conflicts in their newly formed work arrangements, as well as technical-level conflicts within the infrastructures of the market. We analyzed these conflicts alongside breakdowns they mitigate through coping strategies. Our findings suggest that while some conflicts—whether socially or technically caused—can be resolved by intermediaries, others must be bridged using concepts of ‘adversarial interoperability’ or ‘backward interoperability’. Hence, when designing CSCW systems of organizations interacting with consumers, we should also consider the role of intermediaries, their work practices, and the conflicts identified in this study.

Abstract The digitization of financial activities in consumers' lives is increasing, and the digitalization of invoicing processes is expected to play a significant role, although this area is not well understood regarding the private sector. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) research have a long history of analyzing the socio-material and temporal aspects of work practices that are relevant for the domestic domain. The socio-material structuring of invoicing work and the working styles of consumers must be considered when designing effective consumer support systems. In this ethnomethodologically-informed, design-oriented interview study, we followed 17 consumers in their daily practices of dealing with invoices to make the invisible administrative work involved in this process visible. We identified and described the meaningful artifacts that were used in a spatial-temporal process within various storage locations such as input, reminding, intermediate (for postponing cases) buffers, and archive systems. Furthermore, we identified three different working styles that consumers exhibited: direct completion, at the next opportunity, and postpone as far as possible. This study contributes to our understanding of household economics and domestic workplace studies in the tradition of CSCW and has implications for the design of electronic invoicing systems.

Previous CSCW research has paid increasing attention to regional innovation systems providing the context for CSCW research and design. In this paper we provide insights into attempts to intervene in such a regional innovation system via practice-oriented activities. Our findings describe experiences of co-creating knowledge around digitization of SMEs on a regional level, beyond individual company contexts. We reflect on the benefits and challenges such an approach affords and highlight the importance of interpersonal relationships and similarities between practices in different contexts to enable intended but also initially unexpected knowledge spillovers. Our findings highlight how a praxeological approach to CSCW can be influential in regional development programs, and open this field to CSCW research and design. We draw out lessons for similar interventions and outline fruitful avenues for future research.

AI-powered systems pose unknown challenges for designers, policymakers, and users, making it more difficult to assess potential harms and outcomes. Although understanding risks is a requirement for building trust in technology, users are often excluded from risk assessments and explanations in policy and design. To address this issue, we conducted three workshops with 18 participants and discussed the EU AI Act, which is the European proposal for a legal framework for AI regulation. Based on results of these workshops, we propose a user-centered conceptual model with five risk dimensions (Design and Development, Operational, Distributive, Individual, and Societal) that includes 17 key risks. We further identify six criteria for categorizing use cases. Our conceptual model (1) contributes to responsible design discourses by connecting the risk assessment theories with user-centered approaches, and (2) supports designers and policymakers in more strongly considering a user perspective that complements their own expert views.

Dark patterns are deceptive designs that influence a user’s interactions with an interface to benefit someone other than the user. Prior work has identified dark patterns in windows, icons, menus, and pointer (WIMP) interfaces and ubicomp environments, but how dark patterns can manifest in Augmented and Virtual Reality (collectively XR) requires more attention. We therefore conducted 10 co-design workshops with 20 experts in XR and deceptive design. Our participants co-designed 42 scenarios containing dark patterns, based on application archetypes presented in recent HCI/XR literature. In the co-designed scenarios, we identified 10 novel dark patterns in addition to 39 existing ones, as well as 10 examples in which specific characteristics associated with XR potentially amplified the effect dark patterns could have on users. Based on our findings and prior work, we present a classification of XR-specific properties that facilitate dark patterns: perception, spatiality, physical/virtual barriers, and XR device sensing. We also present the experts’ assessments of the likelihood and severity of the co-designed scenarios and highlight key aspects they considered for this evaluation, for example, technological feasibility, ease of upscaling and distributing malicious implementations, and the application’s context of use. Finally, we discuss means to mitigate XR dark patterns and support regulatory bodies to reduce potential harms.

Many datasets are of increasingly high dimension- ality, where a large number of features could be irrelevant to the learning task. The inclusion of such features would not only introduce unwanted noise but also increase computational complexity. Deep neural networks (DNNs) outperform machine learning (ML) algorithms in a variety of applications due to their effectiveness in modelling complex problems and handling high-dimensional datasets. However, due to non-linearity and higher-order feature interactions, DNN models are unavoidably opaque, making them black-box methods. In contrast, an interpretable model can identify statistically significant features and explain the way they affect the model’s outcome. In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve the interpretability of blackbox models in the case of high-dimensional datasets. First, a black-box model is trained on full feature space that learns useful embeddings on which the classification is performed. To decompose the inner principles of the black-box and to identify top-k important features (global explainability), probing and perturbing techniques are applied. An interpretable surrogate model is then trained on top-k feature space to approximate the black-box. Finally, decision rules and counterfactuals are derived from the surrogate to provide local decisions. Our approach outperforms tabular learners, e.g., TabNet and XGboost, and SHAP-based interpretability techniques, when tested on a number of datasets having dimensionality between 54 and 20,5311.1GitHub: https://github.com/rezacsedu/DeepExplainHidim

Foreseeing the impact of augmented and virtual reality applications on users and society is challenging. Thus, efforts to establish an ethical mindset and include technology assessment techniques in HCI education are increasing. However, XR educational courses fostering students’ reasoning and perceived responsibility in designing ethical applications are lacking. We, therefore, developed the explorative design method Reality Composer to investigate and foster the students’ assessment of the ethical impact of and responsibilities in XR application design. We conducted a workshop with 40 international HCI master students applying this method and analyzed the resulting application concepts regarding the students’ ethical assessment. Our findings show that they critically discussed their concepts’ impact and identified potential countermeasures for negative social implications. However, they overestimated the users’ responsibility to securely use XR applications as well as a positive design intention. We contribute with our findings and developed method to understand students’ potential and derive future course design implications.

There has been a growing interest in taste research in the HCI and CSCW communities. However, the focus is more on stimulating the senses, while the socio-cultural aspects have received less attention. However, individual taste perception is mediated through social interaction and collective negotiation and is not only dependent on physical stimulation. Therefore, we study the digital mediation of taste by drawing on ethnographic research of four online wine tastings and one self-organized event. Hence, we investigated the materials, associated meanings, competences, procedures, and engagements that shaped the performative character of tasting practices. We illustrate how the tastings are built around the taste-making process and how online contexts differ in providing a more diverse and distributed environment. We then explore the implications of our findings for the further mediation of taste as a social and democratized phenomenon through online interaction.

Abstract Despite various attempts to prevent food waste and motivate conscious food handling, household members find it difficult to correctly assess the edibility of food. With the rise of ambient voice assistants, we did a design case study to support households’ in situ decision-making process in collaboration with our voice agent prototype, Fischer Fritz. Therefore, we conducted 15 contextual inquiries to understand food practices at home. Furthermore, we interviewed six fish experts to inform the design of our voice agent on how to guide consumers and teach food literacy. Finally, we created a prototype and discussed with 15 consumers its impact and capability to convey embodied knowledge to the human that is engaged as sensor. Our design research goes beyond current Human-Food Interaction automation approaches by emphasizing the human-food relationship in technology design and demonstrating future complementary human-agent collaboration with the aim to increase humans’ competence to sense, think, and act.

Current research in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality (XR) reveals a lack of tool support for designing and, in particular, prototyping XR applications. While recent tools research is often motivated by studying the requirements of non-technical designers and end-user developers, the perspective of industry practitioners is less well understood. In an interview study with 17 practitioners from different industry sectors working on professional XR projects, we establish the design practices in industry, from early project stages to the final product. To better understand XR design challenges, we characterize the different methods and tools used for prototyping and describe the role and use of key prototypes in the different projects. We extract common elements of XR prototyping, elaborating on the tools and materials used for prototyping and establishing different views on the notion of fidelity. Finally, we highlight key issues for future XR tools research.

Voice assistants (VA) collect data about users’ daily life including interactions with other connected devices, musical preferences, and unintended interactions. While users appreciate the convenience of VAs, their understanding and expectations of data collection by vendors are often vague and incomplete. By making the collected data explorable for consumers, our research-through-design approach seeks to unveil design resources for fostering data literacy and help users in making better informed decisions regarding their use of VAs. In this paper, we present the design of an interactive prototype that visualizes the conversations with VAs on a timeline and provides end users with basic means to engage with data, for instance allowing for filtering and categorization. Based on an evaluation with eleven households, our paper provides insights on how users reflect upon their data trails and presents design guidelines for supporting data literacy of consumers in the context of VAs.

Augmented/Virtual Reality (AR/VR) is still a fragmented space to design for due to the rapidly evolving hardware, the interdisciplinarity of teams, and a lack of standards and best practices. We interviewed 26 professional AR/VR designers and developers to shed light on their tasks, approaches, tools, and challenges. Based on their work and the artifacts they generated, we found that AR/VR application creators fulfill four roles: concept developers, interaction designers, content authors, and technical developers. One person often incorporates multiple roles and faces a variety of challenges during the design process from the initial contextual analysis to the deployment. From analysis of their tool sets, methods, and artifacts, we describe critical key challenges. Finally, we discuss the importance of prototyping for the communication in AR/VR development teams and highlight design implications for future tools to create a more usable AR/VR tool chain.

Over the last decades, different kinds of design guides have been created to maintain consistency and usability in interactive system development. However, in the case of spatial applications, practitioners from research and industry either have difficulty finding them or perceive such guides as lacking relevance, practicability, and applicability. This paper presents the current state of scientific research and industry practice by investigating currently used design recommendations for mixed reality (MR) system development. We analyzed and compared 875 design recommendations for MR applications elicited from 89 scientific papers and documentation from six industry practitioners in a literature review. In doing so, we identified differences regarding four key topics: Focus on unique MR design challenges, abstraction regarding devices and ecosystems, level of detail and abstraction of content, and covered topics. Based on that, we contribute to the MR design research by providing three factors for perceived irrelevance and six main implications for design recommendations that are applicable in scientific and industry practice.

Abstract Advoc ates of autonomous driving predict that the occupation of taxi driver could be made obsolete by shared autonomous vehicles (SAV) in the long term. Conducting interviews with German taxi drivers, we investigate how they perceive the changes caused by advancing automation for the future of their business. Our study contributes insights into how the work of taxi drivers could change given the advent of autonomous driving: While the task of driving could be taken over by SAVs for standard trips, taxi drivers are certain that other areas of their work such as providing supplementary services and assistance to passengers would constitute a limit to such forms of automation, but probably involving a shifting role for the taxi drivers, one which focuses on the sociality of the work. Our findings illustrate how taxi drivers see the future of their work, suggesting design implications for tools that take various forms of assistance into account, and demonstrating how important it is to consider taxi drivers in the co-design of future taxis and SAV services.

We present the results of a design case study focusing on supporting the daily transportation of elderly in Germany. We conceptualized, developed and studied the appropriation of a transportation information system intended to ease switching between different transportation modes. Based on a literature review and a context study with 21 interviews we explored routinized transport mode usage and barriers when switching between modes. Iteratively, we co-designed a transport platform accessible via a website, a mobile app, and an iTV app. We further looked at the appropriation of the platform into the daily lives of 19 persons. Studying the appropriation highlighted different factors that facilitate the adoption of alternative transport options. The factors included reducing uncertainty, complementing transport information with context information (e.g. weather) and providing informational access based on the user's preferences as well as fitting in with the situational needs (activity related).

3D printers have become continuously more present and are a perspicuous example of how technologies are becoming more complex and ubiquitous. To some extent, the emerging technological infrastructures around them exemplify ways how digitalization will change production machines and lines, in general, in the Internet of Things (IoT). From an End-User Development perspective, the main question is how users can be supported in managing those complex digital production lines. To reach a better understanding, we carefully analyzed 3D printers as an example of highly digitalized production machines with regard to the creative activities of their users that help them to make these machines work for their practices. In our study of appropriation processes, we are concerned with situational and social aspects of the configuration and practice challenges associated with making digitalization work and how IoT technologies can support these collaborative appropriation activities of end users by making these machines more “sociable.” We therefore conceptualize the idea of “Sociable Technologies” and implement a prototype that provides hardware-integrated affordances for communicating and documenting practices of usage. Based on the findings of our evaluation, we derive lessons learnt when aiming at making complex technologies more usable.

Research in the field of assistive technologies often claims to support their target group's autonomy. However, autonomy is mostly interpreted by the researchers and designers as independence or its meaning is not further specified. There are few studies where the users' perception and interpretation of autonomy is taken into account. Hence, technology for supporting autonomy is often rather intricate and based on a generalized notion of autonomy. We argue that autonomy contains more dimensions than just mere independence. Furthermore, we argue that the perception of autonomy is individually differing and focussing on small, individual solutions my help in shaping autonomy support on an individual level.

The availability of ICT services can be severely disrupted in the aftermath of disasters. Ad-hoc assemblages of communication technology have the potential to bridge such breakdowns. This article investigates the use of an ad-hoc system for sending SOS signals in a large-scale exercise that simulated a terrorist attack. In this context, we found that the sensitivity that was introduced by the adversarial nature of the situation posed unexpected challenges for our approach, as giving away one's location in the immediate danger of a terrorist attack became an issue both for first responders and the affected people in the area. We show how practices of calling for help and reacting to help calls can be affected by such a system and affect the management of the visibility and validity of SOS calls, implying a need for further negotiation in situations where communication is sensitive and technically restrained.

Over the last years, digital fabrication technologies such as 3D printers have become more and more common at universities and small businesses as well as in communities of hobbyist makers. The high complexity of such technologies, the rapid technological progress and the close link between hardware and software in this field poses challenges for users and communites learning how to operate these machines, especially in the contexts of existing (and changing) practices. We present an empirical study on the appropriation of 3D printers in two different communities and derive design implications and challenges for building appropriation infrastructures to help users face those challenges and making technologies more sociable.

We present the design and evaluation of a lightweight mobile S.O.S. system that facilitates ad-hoc communication between first responders and victims in emergency situations. Our approach leverages established protocols and standards in unforeseen ways to provide a platform supporting the creation of short-lived communication links. The system comprises two mobile applications: one victim application that allows the broadcasting of distress signals by a novel use of Wi-Fi SSIDs; and a responder application that allows first responders to discover and trace the people broadcasting the signals. The main difference of our system with other platforms enabling communication in crisis situations is that our system is independent from existing network infrastructure and runs on off-the-shelf, commercially available smartphones. We describe the results of our evaluation process in the context of both a design evaluation during a real-world emergency response exercise and of two user workshops in preparation for an upcoming large-scale exercise.

The high complexity of knowledge-intensive work such as software development makes it beneficial to have spaces for formal and informal articulation work. Existing information systems (IS) tend to treat these different aspects of coordination separately, resulting in problems of awareness and coordination. To bridge this gap, we present the concept of Articulation Spaces which combines aspects of Coordination Mechanisms and Common Information Spaces (CIS) in order to provide a room for mediating between the formal and informal aspects of coordination. Based on a design study in the form of a lightweight public display that has been tested in a medium-sized German software company, we show how Articulation Spaces provide information for meta-coordination, encourage ad-hoc coordination and support decision-making processes. Our findings provide insights into the design of support systems for flexible and coordination-intensive contexts such as software development work.

Based on a field study in Guangdong Province, this paper describes the social media use of Chinese migrant workers in the manufacturing sector. It was found that social media plays a significant role in the lives of young workers who have left their rural hometowns in early adulthood and struggle to survive in the urban centers. They buy expensive IT devices to gain a social reputation, as social media provides opportunities for self-expression; strengthens their self-consciousness; and to a certain extent, influences their world view. For most of the workers in our study, social media has become a very important part of leisure time and entertainment. Moreover, the life in virtual worlds provides them a psychological compensation mechanism to temporarily avoid the pressure of their daily lives.

Software engineers and developers are surrounded by highly complex software systems. What does it take to cope with these? We introduce a field study that explores the maintenance of the Eclipse Integrated Development Environment by software developers as part of their daily work. The study focuses on appropriation of the Eclipse IDE. We present an empirical view on appropriation as a means to maintain the collective ability to work. We visited seven different organizations and observed and interviewed their members. Each organization was chosen to provide an overall picture of Eclipse use throughout the industry. The results decompose the appropriation of Eclipse by software developers in organizations into four categories: learning, tailoring and discovering, as well as the cross-cutting category: collaboration. The categories are grounded in situations that provoked a need to change as well as in policies adopted for coping with this need. By discussing these categories against the background of Eclipse and its ecosystem, we want to illustrate in what ways appropriation of component- or plugin- based software is nowadays a common and highly complex challenge for Eclipse users, and how the related appropriation practices can be supported by IT systems.

There is an increasing spread of flexible software applications that can be modified by adding components (sometimes called plug-ins or add-ons). A popular example in the software development domain is Eclipse, a flexible development environment that can be extended with literally thousands of different plug-ins. However, searching, installing and configuring new plug-ins requires complex overhead work that is only weakly addressed by existing support mechanisms. Recent research has highlighted the related practices of learning about new plug-ins and tailoring software tools as being highly cooperative, situated, socially embedded, and often connected to particular work situations. Based on an empirical study in small software enterprises, we develop an understanding of appropriation as a social and collaborative activity. We then suggest design principles for appropriation support that are grounded in the practices we have found in the field, and present a prototypical implementation of the concept that extends existing mechanisms of sharing tools and tool-knowledge.

SUMMARY The impact of culture on knowledge management in international teams is an important topic which is still not well understood. We contribute to the discussion by presenting two case studies of small software teams involved in distributed software development. In doing so, we illustrate how cultural and social issues influence the way knowledge exchange is performed by analyzing four knowledge sharing practices: status meetings and maintaining awareness, the collaborative use of shared artifacts and repositories, spending time at the other site and human ‘bridges’ that mediate between people and cultures. Our findings suggest that organizational culture is permanently re‐negotiated and adjusted to fit the distributed collaboration, as the teams learn how to deal with each other. Socialization plays a significant role in this learning process, and people are more likely to draw on national stereotypes when breakdowns occur. The influences of national culture and site‐specific organizational culture are subtle and not easy to separate from other factors. Based on our experience, we argue that in order to achieve an accurate understanding of knowledge sharing practices in globally distributed software teams, these need to be studied in context, longitudinally, and from both the onshore and offshore perspectives. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Software development requires complex context specific knowledge regarding the particularities of different technologies, the potential of existing software and the needs and expectations of the users. Hence, efficient knowledge management counts amongst the most important challenges for software teams. In international teams, one of the most important issues regarding knowledge sharing is the impact of culture under different aspects: national, organizational and professional. There seem to be very few studies dealing with the issue of culture in regard to knowledge management practices in GSE. We want to contribute to the discussion by presenting case studies of small size software teams dealing with international software development in the context of offshoring. In doing so, we illustrate how cultural and social issues influence the way knowledge exchange is performed by analyzing several knowledge management practices, considering the role of meetings, artifacts and tools, knowledge brokers and mutual visits between sites.

Global software development has become an important issue for small and medium enterprises. However, the distinct requirements of SME are still not so well understood. In order to contribute to the discussion we present case studies in two small German software companies that engage in offshoring of software development to Eastern Europe. By applying Strauss' articulation work framework we show to what extent SME rely upon situated coordination practices in order to warrant their agility. These practices are applied during discussions in which the actors reflexively evolve problems and solutions from their distinct perspectives and work practices. Thereby they are closely related to formal and informal communication, which takes place both locally and between the different teams. Our findings further suggest that specialized tools for the support of situated coordination practices in terms of articulation work are not so common in practice.