We examine how micro-phenomenology, a qualitative research method developed to attend to, articulate, and analyse lived experience in fine detail, can be employed to study the experience of using digital systems. Micro-phenomenological interviews unpack the specific experiences of interviewees in fine-grained detail and have previously been acknowledged as a potent tool for Human-Computer Interaction Research. More recently, the method has been extended to comprise a structured analysis method to systematically analyse the temporal unfolding and qualitative dimensions of experiences captured by the interviews. This is the first paper demonstrating the combined use of interviews and analysis via a case in which they were employed to examine the experience of using WeUsedTo, a website for sharing experiences related to the COVID-19 pandemic. On this basis, we discuss the potentials of the method for eliciting and understanding experiential aspects of interactive systems, particularly pertaining to embodiment, temporality, attention, agency, and the systemic nature of experience.

Creative practitioners rely on tools to capture and manage ideas as a foundational aspect of their work. However, we have little knowledge about how idea management practices vary in different creative domains. Combining insights from qualitative surveys ( N \(\sim\) 200) and follow-up in-depth interviews ( n \(\sim\) 60) with creative professionals from four domains (interaction design, research, music, and graphics) of creative work, we report on (1) how ideas are externalized in practitioners’ archives, (2) what they consider important when choosing tools to capture ideas, and (3) how these tool collections resemble and differ from each other. Our cross-domain study demonstrates that participants’ tool use reflects idea capture characteristic needs as well as domain-specific views about the creative process. We conclude with a discussion about capturing as an externalizing activity, practitioners’ use of the term ideas , and four suggestions for directions in the design of creativity support tools.

To understand and support creative work, we need to look at its manifestation in everyday professional practice. We do so by focusing on the core activity of capturing and managing material representations of ideas, i.e. idea management. Starting from previous empirical research in other domains, we devise a theoretical framework and extend it in the domain of Graphics. Combining a qualitative survey (n=48) and in-depth interviews (n=15), we look for unexpected themes that emerge only among graphic professionals. We expand the existing knowledge in four main ways: we identify what makes a graphic idea good compared to other domains, we observe that practitioners balance conflicting creative identities with consequences on their idea management needs, that graphic ideas are sculpted out of inspirational material, and that creative control is negotiated with clients and collaborators.

Advances in artificial intelligence present a need for fostering AI literacy in workplaces. While there is a lack of research on how this can be achieved, there are documented successful approaches in child-computer interaction (CCI), albeit aimed at K-12 education. We present an in-vivo explorative case study of how CCI approaches can be adopted for adult professionals via a full-day workshop developed in collaboration with a trade union to upskill workers. Analyzing data from pre- and post-surveys, a follow-up survey, and materials produced by participants (n=53), we demonstrate how this increased participants’ knowledge of AI while their self-efficacy and empowerment did not improve. This is similar to findings from K-12 education, pointing to self-efficacy and empowerment as major challenges for AI literacy across sectors. We discuss the role of ambassadorships and professional organizations in addressing these issues, and indicate research directions for the CHI community.

In this paper, we explore the potential of AI-assisted visualization during the problem identification and construction phase of the creative problem-solving process. We examine this within the context of the ongoing crea.visions research project, which employs AI technologies to visualize citizens' visions of the future. Our findings underscore various factors contributing to the effectiveness of assisted visualization in this setting, such as: 1) the tool's dual role as both a visual and ideational aid, 2) the introduction of innovative collaborative elements like prompt engineering, 3) the enhancement of visual expression without requiring artistic skills, and 4) the facilitation of idea communication. We also recognize limitations related to the tool and the problem context such as abstract concepts. This study serves as a foundation for future research on AI-assisted image generation as a resource in creative problem-solving, laying the groundwork for the creation of increasingly effective and user-friendly tools.

Establishing, maintaining, and using collections of ideas and sources of inspiration is a common and important practice for music artists. Yet, it is underexplored in research. We therefore examine the research question of how do music artists capture and manage their ideas. To get an overview of the general patterns in the workflows of music artists, as well as in-depth understandings of these practices and the perceptions of music artists, our method combines qualitative surveys (n=51) with in-depth qualitative interviews (n=15). We find that a set of values are foundational to idea management routines that originate in music artists’ perceptions of what makes an idea “good”. We also identify the different forms that musical ideas can take in idea collections, what drives their retrieval, characteristic development approaches, and different styles for collaborating on ideas. Finally, we discuss recommendations for the design of tools for supporting idea management in music.

Research ideas are pivotal in research practice. While research domains, topics, and methods are often outlined by specific research fields, the process of capturing and developing research ideas is less categorical. Conceiving and developing research ideas requires continuous creative thinking, usually supported by various different tools, each more or less carefully selected by a researcher to fulfill a specific purpose. In this paper, we investigate the creative work practices of academic researchers, with a focus on the workflows and tools they employ to manage ideas. Through a qualitative survey (n=51) and in-depth interviews (n=18) with researchers from a wide range of fields, we identify and describe typical processes of managing research ideas, different types of research ideas (a research question or problem, a method, a hypothesis or antithesis, and a theory), properties of good research ideas, as well as potentials for tools and technology to support idea management for researchers.

Digital tools that support creative activities are ubiquitous in the design industry, yet practitioners appear to prefer pen and paper for design ideation. To better understand this exception, we conducted a comparative study between analog and digital tools and their impact on the divergent and convergent thinking patterns of groups of designers. We analysed how 24 participants solved comparable design ideation tasks in two conditions using linkographic protocol analysis – a notation method that focuses on identifying and linking small steps in the design process called moves. Our findings suggest that digital ideation tools yield more convergent thinking compared to analog tools, with no discernible impact on general productivity or divergent thinking.

Understanding users is central to design and Human-Computer Interaction, both for researchers and for practitioners, who often conduct user research and communicate its value to stakeholders and clients. Despite its praised relevance, we know little about how user research affects design creativity. Our objective is to establish a foundation for answering this question. We first review empirical findings from related domains and examine how the value of user research is linked to design creativity. We then present a pilot study for a large-scale experimental setup to determine how different levels of user research influence design creativity. Finally, we discern preliminary insights on the relationship and provides recommendations for how future studies may investigate the critical and complex relationship between user research and design creativity.

The design and development of Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) is of growing interest in research at the intersection of creativity and Human-Computer Interaction, and has been identified as a 'grand challenge for HCI'. While creativity research and HCI each have had long-standing discussions about---and rich toolboxes of---evaluation methodologies, the nascent field of CST evaluation has so far received little attention. We contribute a survey of 113 research papers that present and evaluate CSTs, and we offer recommendations for future CST evaluation. We center our discussion around six major points that researchers might consider: 1) Clearly define the goal of the CST; 2) link to theory to further understanding of usage of CSTs; 3) recruit domain experts, if applicable and feasible; 4) consider longitudinal, in-situ studies; 5) distinguish and decide whether to evaluate usability or creativity; and 6) as a community, help develop a toolbox for CST evaluation.

In this pictorial, we investigate how a virtual collection can put down its roots in a physical space and integrate into the local community. We present PLACED, a place-centric digital service that supports participation and community-production of knowledge in library events. We illustrate how PLACED has been deployed and used at a local public library over a six-month period. We examine the community-produced virtual collection that grew out of this library event with a focus on its placeness.

We investigate how to design community technologies for public events. We do so with a focus on technologies that give rise to new forms of participation and knowledge co-production in public libraries. Specifically, we deployed a digital service at a major public library during its four-week creative workshop series. The system offered an alternative way for people to work together as a community, to go beyond achieving individual goals, and to contribute to the achievement of public goals (e.g., building community bookshelves). We report on how the system has reconfigured physical spaces and afforded new social practices in the library. We propose Computational Alternatives as a fruitful approach for gaining situated, nuanced insights into a technology's possible adoption. We offer key insights in the form of computational alternatives vignettes -- grounded stories that encapsulate sociotechnical implications of technology, pointing to plausible alternative futures.

This article presents a grounded theory analysis based on a qualitative study of professional interaction designers ( n = 20) with a focus on how they use tools to manage design ideas. Idea management can be understood as a subcategory of the field personal information management, which includes the activities around the capture, organization, retrieval, and use of information. Idea management pertains to the management and use of ideas , a particular type of information, as part of creative activities. The article identifies tool-supported idea management strategies and needs of professional interaction designers, and discusses the context and consequences of these strategies. Based on our analysis, we identify a conceptual framework of 10 strategies which are supported by tools: saving, externalizing, advancing, exploring, archiving, clustering, extracting, browsing, verifying, and collaborating . Finally, we discuss how this framework can be used to characterize and analyze existing and novel idea management tools.

On the basis of a qualitative study of five domains of creative work, this paper analyzes two recurring strategies in the use of digital tools, 'margins' and 'view-shifts'. These strategies are commonly employed by creative professionals across five different domains. Based on video from observational studies of music producers, video production, industrial design, graphic design, and service design, we conduct a thematic analysis to arrive at the two strategies. We furthermore examine the two strategies in relation to existing research into creativity and cognition, and discuss how this can inform future studies of the use of digital tools in creative work.

Creativity Support Tools (CSTs) play a fundamental role in the study of creativity in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Even so, there is no consensus definition of the term 'CST' in HCI, and in most studies, CSTs have been construed as one-off exploratory prototypes, typically built by the researchers themselves. This makes it difficult to clearly demarcate CST research, but also to compare findings across studies, which impedes advancement in digital creativity as a growing field of research. Based on a literature review of 143 papers from the ACM Digital Library (1999-2018), we contribute a first overview of the key characteristics of CSTs developed by the HCI community. Moreover, we propose a tentative definition of a CST to help strengthen knowledge sharing across CST studies. We end by discussing our study's implications for future HCI research on CSTs and digital creativity.

Buildings and urban spaces increasingly incorporate artificial intelligence and new forms of interactivity, raising a wide span of research questions about the future of human experiences with, and within, built environments. We call this emerging area Human-Building Interaction (HBI) and introduce it as an interdisciplinary domain of research interfacing Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) with Architecture and Urban Design. HBI seeks to examine the involvement of HCI in studying and steering the evolution of built environments. Therefore, we need to ask foundational questions such as the following: what are the specific attributes of built environments that HCI researchers should take into account when shifting attention and scale from “artefacts” to “environments”? Are architecture and interaction design methods and processes compatible? Concretely, how can a team of interaction designers bring their tools to an architectural project, and collaborate with other stakeholders? Can and will architecture change the theory and practice of HCI? Furthermore, research in HBI should produce knowledge and practical guidelines by experimenting novel design instances that combine architecture and digital interaction. The primary aim of this article is to specify the mission, vision, and scope of research in HBI. As the introductory article to the TOCHI special issue, it also provides a summary of published manuscripts and describes their collective contribution to the development of this field.

Over the last decade, a number of craft-based approaches to research have emerged within the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). In this paper, we examine the roots of crafting as they apply to these approaches, which blend analog crafts with digital technology, and we outline three defining characteristics: the integration of analog and digital crafting processes, the creation of highly refined products, and the creation of a deep and embodied knowledge. Moreover, we demonstrate how Richard Sennett's tripartite deconstruction of the crafting process can be applied to support analysis of the types and processes of knowledge generated in craft-based approaches to HCI.

Creativity has been a growing topic in the ACM community since the 1990s; however, no clear overview of this trend has been offered. We present a thorough survey of 998 creativity-related publications in the ACM Digital Library collected using keyword search to determine prevailing approaches, topics, and characteristics of creativity- oriented Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. A selected sample based on yearly citations yielded 221 publications, which were analyzed using constant comparison analysis. We found that HCI is almost exclusively responsible for creativity-oriented publications; they focus on collaborative creativity rather than individual creativity; there is a general lack of definition of the term 'creativity'; empirically based contributions are prevalent; and many publications focus on new tools, often developed by researchers. On this basis, we present three implications for future creativity-oriented HCI research: develop and employ clearer definitions of creativity; go beyond in-vitro studies of novel tools; and move toward interdisciplinary research collaborations.

This paper contributes an analytical framework to improve understanding of the composition of recognized creativity methods used in design. Based on an extensive literature review, our framework synthesizes key concepts from design and particularly creativity research, and is further supported by significant experience with creativity methods in design. We propose that nine concepts are relevant for analyzing creativity methods in design: process structure, materials, tools, combination, metaphor, analogy, framing, divergence, and convergence. To test their relevance as components of an analytical framework, we use these key concepts to analyze three recognized creativity methods that we have often used ourselves: Inspiration Card Workshops, Fictional Inquiry, and Extreme Characters. Our analytical framework expands current categorizations of methods and offers new insight into how creativity methods are composed, how and why they work, and how they potentially may be tweaked or refined for enhanced deployment in design.

The aim of the workshop is to examine and discuss how computers can support, enrich, and transform collaborative creative processes. By exploring and combining methodological, theoretical, and design-oriented perspectives, we wish to examine the implications, potentials, and limitations of different approaches to providing digital support for collaborative creativity. Participation in the workshop requires participants to actively document and identify salient themes in one or more examples of computer-supported collaborative creativity, and the resulting material will serve as the empirical grounding for workshop discussions.

Design ideas are commonly used as an indicator of success of design methods and processes. Yet it is very rarely defined what precisely constitutes "an idea", and how such an idea manifests itself to the researcher. This paper presents an examination of design idea definitions based on a thorough study of 75 research contributions. We construct a typology of seven definitions of design ideas. The purpose of the typology is to offer shared definitions and descriptions of design ideas to design and creativity researchers, aiding a higher degree of specificity when studying and analyzing the emergence of ideas in design processes.

Documentation of Research through Design (RtD) processes is essential for capturing and translating design knowledge into broader academic knowledge. Moreover, it can support both design and research objectives internally in RtD projects, as well as external concerns such as project management, knowledge dissemination, and education. In spite of this, RtD documentation has received little sustained attention in prior work. Building on what prior work there is as well as an in-depth analysis of two markedly different cases, we present a framework for planning and evaluating RtD documentation. The framework addresses three core concerns: the medium of documentation, the performativity of documentation, and providing equal support for both research and design.

Research through Design (RtD), a research approach that employs methods and approaches from design as a mode of inquiry, has gained momentum within HCI. However, the approach is not yet formalised, and there are ongoing debates about fundamental issues, such as how to articulate and evaluate knowledge that springs from RtD, and how this knowledge is comparable to knowledge from other forms of research. I propose that Rheinberger's conceptualisation of experimental systems, originally developed in the domain of the natural sciences, offers insights that can add to the understanding of these issues, and in turn to the development of RtD as a research approach. I examine key characteristics of experimental systems as they pertain to RtD, with a focus on the role of designs and forms of knowledge representation. I furthermore propose that the experimental systems perspective can shed light on similarities and differences between RtD and other research approaches.

We introduce the participation gestalt framework for analysing participation in public interactive installations. Building on the concept of interaction gestalt, we define the participation gestalt as the unified perception and experience of participatory qualities as they unfold through interaction with the installation in a socio-cultural setting. The framework consists of five continua, mapping out the qualities of participation in relation to the degree of expressivity, exposure, investment, sociality and persistence that people experience when engaging in the interaction. Individually, the five qualities provide a vocabulary for analyzing an interactive installation. Combined, the five qualities constitute a participation gestalt framework by which HCI researchers can qualify how a certain forms of participation emerge around public installations. We exemplify the framework by analyzing four public installations in different socio-cultural contexts and examining their participation gestalt.

Media Architecture is reaching a level of maturity at which we can identify tools and approaches for addressing the main challenges for HCI practitioners working in this field. While previous influential contributions within Media Architecture have identified challenges for designers and offered case studies of specific approaches, here, we (1) provide guidance on how to tackle the domain-specific challenges of Media Architecture design -- pertaining to the interface, integration, content, context, process, prototyping, and evaluation -- on the basis of the development of numerous installations over the course of seven years, and thorough studies of related work, and (2) present five categories of tools and approaches -- software tools, projection, 3D models, hardware prototyping, and evaluation tools -- developed to address these challenges in practice, exemplified through six concrete examples from real-life cases.

Creative processes involve a repertoire of digital devices ranging from mobile phones over tablets and desktop computers to electronic whiteboards and wall-sized displays. While some integration across multiple devices is supported more sophisticated kinds of integration that connect devices and amplify their potential are limited. Many creative practices also rely on physical materials and tools. This will workshop investigate how the combination of physical and digital artifacts can support creative work practices. In this context, we propose to examine: Individual and social creative activities; Creativity methods; Emergence and transformation of design ideas; Generative design materials; Design constraints.

Tangible 3D tabletops are a novel type of interface, which combines tangible tabletop interaction with 3D projection in such a way that the tangible objects can be augmented with visual content corresponding to their physical shapes, positions and orientations on the tabletop. We present a specific tangible 3D tabletop installation, Projected Play, which was developed for and deployed at LEGO World, a four-day event at which visitors immerse themselves in the world of LEGO. The use of Projected Play was documented through observations, interviews and video recordings. We propose an analytical approach to understanding the perception and use of this type of installation building upon existing research into interaction in public spaces. We apply this approach to analyse how people interacted with and experienced the installation. The focal points of the analytical approach include social, cultural and physical aspects of experience, interaction patterns and forms of engagement. Moreover, we critically discuss the potentials and limitations of both the analytical approach and the installation.

This paper suggests a framework for understanding and manoeuvring design spaces based on insights from research into creativity constraints. We define the design space as a conceptual space, which in addition to being co-constituted, explored and developed by the designer encompasses the creativity constraints governing the design process. While design spaces can be highly complex, our constraint-based understanding enables us to argue for the benefits of a systematic approach to mapping and manipulating aspects of the design space. We discuss how designers by means of a simple representation, a design space schema, can identify the properties of the prospective product that s/he can form. Through a case study, we show how design space schemas can support designers in various ways, including gaining an overview of the design process, documenting it, reflecting on it, and developing design concepts. Finally, we discuss the potentials and limitations of this approach.

This paper examines how the dynamics between design and research interests shape and influence the development of design concepts in collaborative design projects. We introduce the concepts of boundary zones and emergent boundary objects in order to account for how different project stakeholders align their interests and move towards shared project goals. Though the study is of a specific case, namely the collaboration between interaction design researchers and architects to develop interactive com-ponents in a new metro station, we show how the concepts of boundary zones and emergent boundary objects can support the articulation and analysis of the way that design concepts emerge and are shaped through ongoing negotiations and reifications.

We present the notion of "bridging concepts" as a particular form of intermediary knowledge in HCI research, residing between theory and practice. We argue that bridging concepts address the challenge of facilitating exchange between theory and practice in HCI, and we compare it to other intermediary forms of knowledge such as strong concepts and conceptual constructs. We propose that bridging concepts have three defining constituents: a theoretical foundation, a set of design articulations and a range of exemplars that demonstrate the scope and potential of their application. These constituents specify how bridging concepts, as a form of knowledge, are accountable to both theory and practice. We present an analysis of the concept of "peepholes" as an example of a bridging concept aimed at spurring user curiosity and engagement.

In this paper, we present a case study of a participatory project that focuses on interaction in large-scale design, namely, the development of the new Urban Mediaspace Aarhus. This project, which has been under way for ten years, embodies a series of issues that arise when participatory design approaches are applied to large-scale, IT-oriented projects. At the same time, it highlights the issues public knowledge institutions face, when interactive technologies challenge their fundamental roles and practices; by extension, this case offers examples of how these challenges may be explored and addressed through IT-based participatory initiatives. We present a range of such activities carried out during the past ten years, and present the main lessons from the project, based on interviews with three key stakeholders. These lessons focus on how to make participation work in practice, how to align different paradigms of inquiry and practice in a project of this scale, and how to capture and anchor the insights from participatory events to inform the ongoing design process.

Interaction design researchers doing research through design face not only the wicked problems in the practice of doing interaction design, but also the wicked problems that exist in the practice of doing research. In this paper we discuss the use of a tool developed for the specific purpose of documenting design projects and prompting reflection about design events as part of doing research through design. Based on cases lasting from nine to thirteen months we address specific benefits and challenges that we have encountered while employing the tool. Challenges concern roles and responsibilities, lack of routines, determining what to document, and finding the right level of detail. Benefits include support of shared reflection and discussion in on-going projects, the development, refining, and reflection upon research questions, scaffolding longitudinal and cross-project studies. Moreover, the benefits derived from entering design materials and other kinds of artefacts into a tool may not be achieved until must later, for instance when writing research publications.

In this workshop, we wish to explore how design processes extending longer periods of time, weeks to several months, can be captured and documented, how this data can be analyzed, and what types of research insights such work can yield. Such topics include, but are not limited to, how ideas emerge, how design concepts are manifested in different forms, how interaction between different participants and stakeholders unfold, etc.

3D projection on physical objects is a particular kind of Augmented Reality that augments a physical object by projecting digital content directly onto it, rather than by using a mediating device, such as a mobile phone or a head-mounted display. In this paper, we present five cases in which we have developed installations that employ 3D projection on physical objects. The installations have been developed in collaboration with external partners and have been put into use in real-life settings such as museums, exhibitions and interaction design laboratories. On the basis of these cases, we present and discuss three central design insights concerning new potentials for well-known 3D effects, dynamics between digital world and physical world, and relations between object, content and context.

Media façades comprise a category of urban computing concerned with the integration of displays into the built environment, including buildings and street furniture. This paper identifies and discusses eight challenges faced when designing urban media façades. The challenges concern a broad range of issues: interfaces, physical integration, robustness, content, stakeholders, situation, social relations, and emerging use. The challenges reflect the fact that the urban setting as a domain for interaction design is characterized by a number of circumstances and socio-cultural practices that differ from those of other domains. In order to exemplify the challenges and discuss how they may be addressed, we draw on our experiences from five experimental design cases, ranging from a 180 m2 interactive building façade to displays integrated into bus shelters.

This paper presents the concept of inquisitive use and discusses design considerations for creating experience-oriented interactive systems that inspire inquisitive use. Inquisitive use is based on the pragmatism of John Dewey and defined by the interrelated aspects of experience, inquiry, and conflict. The significance of this perspective for design is explored and discussed through two case-studies of experience-oriented installations. The paper contributes to the expanding discourse on experience design on a theoretical level by exploring one particular facet of interaction, inquisitive use, and on a practical level by discussing implications for design prompted by insights into inquisitive use. These implications are presented as a set of design sensitivities, which provide contextual insights and considerations for ongoing and future design processes.

In interaction design for experience-oriented uses of technology, a central facet of aesthetics of interaction is rooted in the user's experience of herself “performing her perception.” By drawing on performance (theater) theory, phenomenology and sociology and with references to recent HCI-work on the relation between the system and the performer/user and the spectator's relation to this dynamic, we show how the user is simultaneously operator, performer and spectator when interacting. By engaging with the system, she continuously acts out these three roles and her awareness of them is crucial in her experience. We argue that this 3-in-1 is always already shaping the user's understanding and perception of her interaction as it is staged through her experience of the object's form and expression. Through examples ranging from everyday technologies utilizing performances of interaction to spatial contemporary artworks, digital as well as analogue, we address the notion of the performative spectator and the spectating performer. We demonstrate how perception is also performative and how focus on this aspect seems to be crucial when designing experience-oriented products, systems and services.

In this paper we start from the position that sources of inspiration play an important role in the design process albeit in a frequently intangible way. We present the Inspiration Card Workshop as a collaborative method for combining findings from domain studies, represented in Domain Cards, with sources of inspiration from applications of technology, represented in Technology Cards, to create new concepts for design. We report our findings from three projects in which we have used the method and argue that the use of Inspiration Cards can successfully frame and guide workshops with disparate participants and bring various sources of inspiration into the design process. We furthermore compare the method to four related methods in the design process, namely Future Workshops, Metaphorical Design, Interaction Relabelling and Lateral Thinking.