The sudden prevalence of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems, such as ChatGPT, creates a need for resources to support teachers and students in navigating their use in the classroom. While HCI research has contributed hands-on activities supporting AI literacy, NLP is less explored, and there is a lack of research on how to integrate these tools into teachers’ practices. To address this, we conducted an 18-month Participatory Design process with high-school teachers comprising prototyping, workshops, classroom teaching, and dissemination activities. Through this process, we developed and contribute The Engine Room, a public website with novel digital and unplugged NLP activities that are modular and built around customisable datasets. Our findings show how participatory methods can be used to empower teachers in integrating AI literacy activities into their teaching across various subjects and with a sustained impact. We discuss how a participatory approach can address challenges of designing AI literacy tools and activities.

Emerging cryptographic techniques have the potential to transform foundational societal infrastructures, creating a need to teach their possibilities and limitations to support children’s and youths’ agency in this transformation. With this aim, we first surveyed cryptography experts (n=10) about which cryptographic techniques high school students should be taught. Next, we explored how one of the identified techniques, multi-party computation (MPC), can be taught in high school through a co-design process with five teachers. This process led to the design of four hands-on activities, which were evaluated with 96 high school students. Our findings demonstrate how high-school students can engage with an emerging cryptographic technique through hands-on activities that strategically black-box mathematics. We outline future research directions for teaching emerging cryptographic techniques in K-12 education and discuss how child-computer interaction can support children and youth in exploring future opportunities of cybersecurity.

As digital communication has become integral to children’s social interaction, they must understand when and how their privacy is protected. This paper presents the design and evaluation of Bit:chat, a tangible tool that introduces children to secure communication and cryptography through hands-on collaboration, by combining networked micro:bits, a web interface, and paper templates. Drawing on constructivist and collaborative learning, Bit:chat externalizes client–server communication and cryptographic processes into physical artifacts and actions that children can explore and manipulate. Bit:chat was evaluated in an exploratory study in a K–9 classroom setting, and qualitative results illustrate how the tangible design supported engagement, peer collaboration, and exploratory learning. Quantitative results further show improvements in children’s understanding of core concepts of secure communication. We reflect on how tangible approaches can help children connect abstract cryptographic concepts to the technologies in their everyday lives and discuss the challenges and opportunities for designing such tangible tools.

LLM-infused tools have entered the newsroom, transforming journalistic work practices. A few studies have investigated how LLMs influence journalistic practices, but there is a lack of research on how to design LLM-infused tools to support trustworthy journalism. In this paper, we explore how prototyping within a defined design space can help identify and explore the challenges of trustworthy LLM integration in journalism. We conduct eight interviews with news industry stakeholders and identify five challenges for trustworthy journalism arising with the introduction of LLMs: factuality, neutrality, autonomy, efficiency, and AI literacy. Based on these challenges, we map a design space and iteratively explore four prototypes of interactive interfaces promoting trustworthy LLM-infused journalism, which are evaluated with news industry stakeholders. We discuss opportunities and conflicts within the design space, how interactive interfaces can be used to concretize guidelines for AI use, and challenges in incorporating Explainable AI into everyday tools for journalists.

Expanded use context of an educational toolkitEducator Figure 1: Existing HCI research mainly focuses on demonstrating novel approaches and tools to engage students with machine learning through embodied interaction.With ML-Machine, we expand the context of use and investigate how an educational toolkit can support teachers and education professionals in developing material, designing activities, and deploying embodied activities with machine learning.(Image used with permission from the children and their legal guardians)

Figure 1: To support teachers and students in acting skillfully around AI, we explore how AI technologies and methods can interplay with knowledge and skills in existing school subjects.From left to right: Teachers engaging with AI activities as part of a workshop; students discussing sentences which they are annotating to train a language model; a teacher's lesson plan which integrates machine learning activities into mathematics.

CS Unplugged: computing education activities without digital tools have successfully engaged young students in fundamental computing concepts. While CS Unplugged fosters qualities such as collaboration and kinesthetic engagement, it requires significant facilitation and offers little room for students' experimentation. Addressing these limitations, we augment unplugged activities with tangible computing by designing and evaluating Bit:sort. Bit:sort supports young students' exploration of sorting algorithms using the micro:bit platform, maintaining the embodied elements of unplugged activities while using tangible computing to direct the activity and provide motivation for collaborative learning. We conducted a study with six groups of 4th-grade students (n=35). Our findings indicate that while students struggle to articulate their problem-solving strategies verbally, they demonstrate algorithmic reasoning through kinesthetic explorations. We discuss the qualities and limitations of augmenting CS Unplugged and propose design guidelines for replugged activities to foster scalable and exploratory learning experiences while maintaining core qualities of the unplugged approach.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and mixed reality (MR) increasingly pervade the world of children, from their schoolwork to leisure activities and social relationships. This has led to Child Computer Interaction (CCI) research supporting children's critical understanding of digital technologies and their ability to influence the design of future digital technologies. Despite these efforts, there are several limitations and challenges in terms of Computational Empowerment (CE) of children. This workshop unites such research 1) to create a shared manifesto for CE of children and 2) to jointly develop a research ‘roadmap’ to push the boundaries of CE of children.

ml-machine.org is a web- and micro:bit-based educational tool for building machine learning models designed to enable more widespread teaching of AI literacy in secondary education. It has been designed as a research product in collaboration with partners from the educational sector, including the Danish Broadcasting Corporation and the Micro:bit Educational Foundation. ml-machine.org currently has more than 5000 unique users and is used in schools and teacher training. It is publicly available and promoted on the broadcasting corporation’s platforms. We describe the two-year process of developing and disseminating ml-machine.org. Based on interviews with partners and educators, we report on how ml-machine.org supports inquiry into the adoption and appropriation of such educational tools. We also provide insights on working with formal education infrastructures in order to scale and integrate a research product into teacher practices. Based on these experiences, we propose infrastructure as a novel quality of research products.

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.

We introduce RoboVisAR, an immersive augmented reality (AR) authoring tool for in-situ robot visualisations. AR robot visualisations, such as the robot's movement path, status, and safety zones, have been shown to benefit human-robot collaboration. However, their creation requires extensive skills in both robotics and AR programming. To address this, RoboVisAR allows users to create custom AR robot visualisations without programming. By recording an example robot behaviour, users can design, combine, and test visualisations in-situ within a mixed reality environment. RoboVisAR currently supports six types of visualisations (Path, Point of Interest, Safety Zone, Robot State, Message, Force/Torque) and four types of conditions for when they are displayed (Robot State, Proximity, Box, Force/Torque). With this tool, users can easily present different visualisations on demand and make them context-aware to avoid visual clutter. An expert user study with three participants suggests that users appreciate the customizability of the visualisations, which could easily be authored in less than ten minutes.

Computing education is becoming increasingly important in high school curricula, but there are challenges in teaching computing, including teachers' professional development and the development of appropriate learning tools. Participatory design and cooperative prototyping offer opportunities for identifying challenges in computing education and ways for teachers to be involved in the design of new learning tools. This study describes the process of codesigning a learning tool to overcome some of these challenges for computing education in high school, involving teachers, developers, and researchers as collaborators. The study investigating how cooperative prototyping and participatory design can lead to mutual learning about challenges in teaching computing. We prototyped learning activities and the learning tool, CoTinker, in collaboration between six teachers, two developers, and four researchers in four subcases and implemented them in classrooms with a total of 83 students. We show how challenges such as students' collaboration and transfer of knowledge in computing education were overcome by applying the prototypes in computing education classrooms in high school.

Augmented Reality (AR) has shown great potential for supporting co-located collaboration. Yet, it is rarely articulated in the design rationales of AR systems that they promote a certain socio-spatial configuration of the users. Learning from proxemics, we argue that such configurations enable and constrain different co-located spatial behaviors with consequences for collaborative activities. We focus specifically on enabling different collaboration styles via the design of Handheld Collaborative Augmented Reality (HCAR) systems. Drawing upon notions of proxemics, we show how different HCAR designs enable different socio-spatial configurations. Through a design exploration, we demonstrate interaction techniques to expand on the notion of collaborative coupling styles by either deliberately designing for aligning with physical reality or going beyond. The main contributions are a proxemics-based conceptual lens and vocabulary for supporting interaction designers in being mindful of the proxemic consequences when developing handheld multi-user AR systems.

This systematic mapping review sheds light on how emerging technologies have been introduced and taught in various K–12 learning settings, particularly with regard to artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT), augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). These technologies are rapidly being integrated into children's everyday lives, but their functions and implications are rarely understood due to their complex and distributed nature. The review provides a rigorous overview of the state of the art based on 107 records published across the fields of human-computer interaction, learning sciences, computing education, and child–computer interaction between 2010 and 2020. The findings show the urgent need on a global scale for inter- and transdisciplinary research that can integrate these dispersed contributions into a more coherent field of research and practice. The article presents nine discussion points for developing a shared agenda to mature the field. Based on the HCI community's expertise in human-centred approaches to technology and aspects of learning, we argue that the community is ideally positioned to take a leading role in the realisation of this future research agenda.

Children grow up in a data economy but grasping how their data are part of this eco-system and how data become valuable to others can be difficult. This work explores how to design tools and activities which support children’s critical data literacy for K-9 education. We bring together two strands of work; First, insights from a co-design process where teachers and researchers designed tools and activities for teaching critical data literacy which they deployed in a lower secondary education classroom. Second, insights from didactic theories from maths and computer science education about working with multiple and rich representations of complex and intangible phenomena. Based on this we contribute three principles for enriching pupils’ relationship to data in order to inform future research into how pupils can be scaffolded in forming richer relationships to the data-driven technologies in their everyday lives in order to retain agency in a data-driven world.

There is a growing focus on computational thinking (CT) in terms of supporting children’s understanding of everyday technologies. But unlike other technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) has received limited attention. In this paper, we present ExposAR – a collaborative cross-device AR system enabling children to create, use, and reflect on AR technologies through the co-creation of a simple AR application. With ExposAR, we explore three core design principles: 1) reify computational concepts, 2) support collaborative cross-device authoring, and 3) incorporate the user’s own world. These principles were developed through a co-design process with teachers and evaluated with 46 primary school students. We found that the collaborative authoring process with ExposAR supported students in understanding AR concepts and challenged their perspectives on AR. With these results, we bring AR to the CT agenda and contribute novel design principles for exposing the underlying mechanisms and implications of AR.

Computational thinking (CT) has been recognized as an important part of K-12 education in many countries and is often described in term relating to computer science both in concepts and context. However, the unique practice of computer scientists collaborating on problem solving is often overlooked in CT education in high school. We believe that collaboration is a key aspect of modern computing, and propose to integrate collaborative CT activities into existing high school education. The aim is to prepare students better for exploring computational approaches to high school disciplines as they are practiced in the professional world. Our research question is: how can we design tools for supporting students' collaboration while teaching CT in high school? A new computational environment, CoTinker, has been developed. The tool uses a cross-device approach and foster students' verbal communication and collaboration in groups. The tool was tested in a Biology class. Students' computational thinking (CT) was assessed through learning activities and students' communication was analyzed by audio recordings, of students, imbedded in CoTinker and by focus group interviews with students. Preliminary findings showed students being able to collaborate and solve CT tasks in groups independent of teacher or researchers. Results also indicated that students were able to use, navigate, and critically reflect upon the CoTinker environment.

Expressivity is frequently recurring as a term in HCI, but it is often approached from different perspectives. Affective computing prompted research into emotional expressivity, and with technology becoming more ubiquitous and tangible, the opportunities for expressive behaviors towards systems as well as the expressivity of systems increases. By analyzing exemplar research-through-design cases and a literature survey on the use of expressivity in interaction, we discuss how different perspectives and concepts contribute to understand expressivity in interaction. We integrate these perspectives and make them operational for interaction design by creating a framework including design considerations such as freedom of interaction, action-perception loops, multimodality, subtlety, ambiguity, skill development and temporal form. The framework is a result of a mixed-method approach including a review of existing definitions and scholarly artefacts, and a systematic literature review to identify design cases including an analysis of these design cases. We finally illustrate how the framework has been used to inform the design of a shape-changing soft-robotic interface. As a result, we contribute an integrated framework on how to design for expressivity in interaction.

Machine Learning (ML) is often used invisibly in everyday applications with little opportunity for consumers to investigate how it works. In this paper, we expand recent efforts to unfold what students should know about ML and how to design tools and activities allowing them to engage with ML. To do so, we explore how to make processes and aspects of ML tangible through the design of the Machine Learning Machine (MLM); a tangible user interface which enables students to create their own data-sets using pen and paper and to iteratively build and test ML models using this data. Based on insights from the design process and a preliminary pilot study with the MLM, we discuss how a tangible approach to engaging with ML can spur curiosity in students and how the iterative process of improving ML models can encourage students to reflect on the relation between data, model and predictions.

The increased use of machine learning (ML) in society raises questions of how ethical dilemmas inherent in computational artefacts can be made understandable and explorable for students. To investigate this, we developed a card-based design workshop that allows students to reflect on ethical dilemmas by designing their own ML applications. The workshop was developed in an iterative process engaging four high school classrooms with students aged 16-20. We found that scaffolding students in designing meaningful ML systems served to qualify their ethical reflections. Further students' design processes allowed them to engage with the ethical dilemmas and to tie these to the properties of the technology and to their design decisions. We suggest seeing technology-close discussions about ethics as a goal in design processes, and prototyping as a means to ground these discussions in students' own design decisions, and we contribute a workshop format and design artefacts that allow for this.

Affordances is an important term in the field of Shape-Changing Interfaces (SCI). But the field is challenged by a multitude of vaguely defined concepts around affordances such as dynamic, spatial, or tactile affordances. In line with this, Alexander et al [1] recently pointed to lack of theory as one of the grand challenges for SCI. This paper proposes a re-analysis of Gibson for resolving the conceptual cacophony in the field of SCI. Essential to the ecological approach to affordances, is that perception is dynamic and people pick up information through exploring objects and environments over time. From this perspective, affordances of Shape-Changing Interfaces become a matter of providing Information - through the design - regarding a) the interfaces' ability to transform its shape and b) how movement suggests level of animacy. Through analyzing scholarly SCI prototypes, from this perspective, we provide an initial set of design strategies for affordances of shape-changing interfaces.

Cross-device interactions enable ad hoc sharing of content and control in co-located collaboration. Cross-device research often draws from proxemics theory for designing interactions based on detection of spatial relations such as distance and orientation between people and devices. However, detection of human-human or human-device proximity also constrains flexibility in co-located social interaction. We suggest a proxemics-based approach to designing flexible cross-device interactions. From observations in a field study, we articulate how co-located sharing practices are shaped by the interplay between everyday mobile devices and the physical environment. Based on these insights, we present three cross-device prototypes as proofs-of-concept, demonstrating three design sensitivities for considering proxemics beyond proximity; incorporating features in the environment, enabling flexibility in interpersonal distance and orientation, and providing multiple alternative action possibilities. Drawing from characteristics of our prototypes, we discuss concrete proposals for designing cross-device interactions to enable flexible social interaction.

A core challenge in tabletop research is to support transitions between individual activities and team work. Shape-changing tabletops open up new opportunities for addressing this challenge. However, interaction design for shape-changing furniture is in its early stages - so far, research has mainly focused on triggering shape-changes, and less on the actual interface transitions. We present KirigamiTable - a novel actuated shape-changing tabletop for supporting transitions in collaborative work. Our work builds on the concept of Proxemic Transitions, considering the dynamic interplay between social interactions, interactive technologies and furniture. With KirigamiTable, we demonstrate the potential of interactions for proxemic transitions that combine transformation of shape and digital contents. We highlight challenges for shape-changing tabletops: initiating shape and content transformations, cooperative control, and anticipating shape-change. To address these challenges, we propose a set of novel interaction techniques, including shape-first and content-first interaction, cooperative gestures, and physical and digital preview of shape-changes.

There is a growing concern that the pervasive individualized, digital means for connecting with others is challenging family togetherness, such as Sherry Turkle expresses it in her book entitled "Alone Together". As a response to this concern, we explore a new direction for designing technologies supporting families being 'Together Together' through using separate activities as drivers for shared activities in designing for domestic family life. The direction derives from the use of Participatory Design techniques, engaging six families in a series of in-situ workshops, envisioning how technology can support shared domestic family experiences. We explore this design space through the design of the STORIES prototype and we present the results from in-situ deployments of the STORIES prototype. We conclude that designing for a combination of separate and shared family activities is a promising approach in designing for Family Togetherness.

The field of Shape-Changing Interfaces explores the qualities of physically dynamic artifacts. At furniture-scale, such artifacts have the potential of changing the ways we collaborate and engage with interiors and physical spaces. Informed by theories of proxemics, empirical studies of informal meetings and design work with shape-changing furniture, we develop the notion of proxemic transitions. We present three design aspects of proxemic transitions: transition speed, stepwise reconfiguration, and radical shifts. The design aspects focus on how to balance between physical and digital transformations in designing for proxemic transitions. Our contribution is three-fold: 1) the notion of proxemic transitions, 2) three design aspects to consider in designing for proxemic transitions, and 3) initial exploration of how these design aspects might generate designs of dynamic furniture. These contributions outline important aspects to consider when designing shape-changing furniture for informal workplace meetings.

People inherently share spaces with other people. Congenitally, interactive technologies and ubiquitous environments shape our opportunities for enacting social relations. Proxemics and Spatial Sharing have been suggested as foundations for our understanding of the socio-spatial aspects of computing. By tandeming these theoretical perspectives in a set of cases in the office domain, we develop a contribution comprised of 3 key sensitizing concepts: Proxemic Malleability, Proxemic Threshold and Proxemic Gravity articulating socio-spatial qualities at the interplay between interactive systems, spaces, interior elements and co-located people. The sensitizing concepts qualify interaction designers in considering proxemic consequences of technology design; they serve both as analytic lenses and as generative instruments in a design process. The proposed sensitizing concepts and the theoretical work of the paper contribute to enhanced Socio-spatial literacy in HCI.

This paper presents the findings from a case study in designing for open-ended constructive play for children. The study is based on a workshop where more that 150 children in ages 3-13 built and played their own musical instruments from Lego. The children used different sensors for playing and performed with their instruments on stage. The workshop was facilitated by a tangible music-making platform called Hitmachine, aiming to empower children to collectively make expressive music without the need for prior musical skills. The findings show how age influenced the children's expressivity, and gives insight into the open-ended qualities of constructive play with music. Based on these findings we propose the Constructive Play Expressivity Model, as a tool for guiding designers' way of thinking about different areas of expressivity, when designing for constructive play interaction.

Shape-changing interfaces allow designers to create user interfaces that physically change shape. However, presently, we lack studies of how such interfaces are designed, as well as what high-level strategies, such as metaphors and affordances, designers use. This paper presents an analysis of sketches made by 21 participants designing either a shape-changing radio or a shape-changing mobile phone. The results exhibit a range of interesting design elements, and the analysis points to a need to further develop or revise existing vocabularies for sketching and analyzing movement. The sketches show a prevalent use of metaphors, say, for communicating volume though big-is-on and small-is-off, as well as a lack of conventions. Furthermore, the affordances used were curiously asymmetrical compared to those offered by non-shape-changing interfaces. We conclude by offering implications on how our results can influence future research on shape-changing interfaces.

Despite an increasing number of examples of shape-changing interfaces, the relation between users' actions and product movements has not gained a great deal of attention, nor been very well articulated. This paper presents a framework articulating the level of control offered to the user over the shape change. The framework considers whether the shape change is: 1) directly controlled by the user's explicit interactions; 2) negotiated with the user; 3) indirectly controlled by the users actions; 4) fully controlled by the system. The four types are described through design examples using ReFlex, a shape-changing interface in the form of a smartphone. The paper concludes that shape-changing interfaces tend to assign the control to either the user or the underlying system, while few (e.g. [16,28]) consider sharing the control between the user and the system.

In the materials sciences there are great expectations for how future nano-scale materials such as Graphene point towards a merging between digital and physical materials unseen before. This in turn provides new opportunities for framing open-ended and constructive play. To explore these opportunities we have conducted a large-scale workshop where several hundred children built music instruments using "conductive Lego" in the form of Lego bricks, copper tape, Makey Makey boards and a PC providing musical instrument sounds. Based on experiences from the workshop we conclude that emerging materials can provide multiple entry points into constructive play. However, we highlight that it is key to find appropriate sweet spots between structured and free play in order to engage children in meaningful activities. We provide a set of concepts serving as analytic lenses for reasoning about such sweet spots.

In this paper we describe results from testing coMotion, a shape-changing bench, in three different contexts: a concert hall foyer, an airport departure hall and a shopping mall. We have gathered insights from more than 120 people, with regard to how users experience and make sense of the bench's shape changing capability. The paper applies McCarthy and Wright's six different sense making processes (anticipating, connecting, interpreting, reflecting, appropriating and recounting) as an instrument to analyse people's experience with shape-changing furniture in the wild. The paper also introduces exploring as a seventh sense making process. Based on this analysis, the paper points to three relevant aspects when designing shape-changing artefacts for the wild, namely: 1) Affordance of shape-changing interfaces, 2) Transitions between background and foreground and 3) Interpreting physically dynamic objects.

In this paper we introduce coMotion, a shape-changing bench. We explore how physical changes of the bench can shape social situations and how contextual atmospheres may affect users' experience of the shape-changing bench and its surroundings. The bench was tested in three different contexts; a concert hall, an airport and a shopping mall. We gathered insights from more than 120 people, as they unexpectedly encountered the shape changing capabilities of the bench. By taking the user tests out of the lab and into the wild, we explored the influence of context on the users experience of a shape-changing interface, as well as on the experienced atmospheres.

Shape change is increasingly used in physical user interfaces, both as input and output. Yet, the progress made and the key research questions for shape-changing interfaces are rarely analyzed systematically. We review a sample of existing work on shape-changing interfaces to address these shortcomings. We identify eight types of shape that are transformed in various ways to serve both functional and hedonic design purposes. Interaction with shape-changing interfaces is simple and rarely merges input and output. Three questions are discussed based on the review: (a) which design purposes may shape-changing interfaces be used for, (b) which parts of the design space are not well understood, and (c) why studying user experience with shape-changing interfaces is important.

People living a global lifestyle connect remotely to their families while away from home. In this paper we identify a need for connecting with a home as the physical place itself. For this purpose we introduce the concept of Home Awareness that connects people sensuously to remote places through sound, light and feeling of temperature. A working prototype has been successfully tested and we present some results from early user studies.

For many people home making is an activity, which extends beyond a single house. We introduce the terminology of Homing as the act of home making, when in a primary home, secondary home or more temporary spaces. By point of departure in existing literature on home making and through ethnographic studies of extremely mobile people we identify general tactics for homing. We present the identified tactics and show how people deploy not only one but several tactics in their intention of making a homely feeling despite not being in their primary home.

introduction Introduction to special issue on the aesthetics of interaction Editors: Marianne Graves Petersen University of Aarhus University of AarhusView Profile , Lars Hallnäs The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, Chalmers University of Technology The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, Chalmers University of TechnologyView Profile , Robert J.K. Jacob Tufts University Tufts UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 15Issue 3November 2008 Article No.: 10pp 1–5https://doi.org/10.1145/1453152.1453153Published:11 December 2008Publication History 13citation762DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations13Total Downloads762Last 12 Months15Last 6 weeks2 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

introduction Share on Introduction to special issue on the aesthetics of interaction Editors: Marianne Graves Petersen University of Aarhus University of AarhusView Profile , Lars Hallnäs The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, Chalmers University of Technology The Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås, Chalmers University of TechnologyView Profile , Robert J.K. Jacob Tufts University Tufts UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 15Issue 4Article No.: 14pp 1–5https://doi.org/10.1145/1460355.1460356Published:11 December 2008Publication History 14citation988DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations14Total Downloads988Last 12 Months23Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

There is a growing interest in considering aesthetic aspects in the design of interactive systems. A set of approaches are emerging each representing different applications of the terminology as well as different inherent assumptions on the role of the user, designer and interaction ideals. In this paper, we use the concept of Pragmatist Aesthetics to provide a framework for distinguishing between different approaches to aesthetics. Moreover, we use our own design cases to illustrate how pragmatist aesthetics is a promising path to follow in the context of designing interactive systems, as it promotes aesthetics of use, rather than aesthetics of appearance. We coin this approach in the perspective of aesthetic interaction. Finally we make the point that aesthetics is not re-defining everything known about interactive systems. We provide a framework placing this perspective among other perspectives on interaction.

Current work in the field of usability tends to focus on snapshots of use as the basis for evaluating designs. However, giving due consideration to the fact that everyday use of technology involves a process of evolution, we set out to investigate how the design of the technology may be used to support this. Based on a long-term empirical study of television use in the homes of two families, we illustrate how use continuously develops in a complex interplay between the users' expectations---as they are formed and triggered by the design---and the needs and context of useper se. We analyze the empirical data from the perspective of activity theory. This framework serves to highlight how use develops, and it supports our analysis and discussion about how design, the users' backgrounds, previous experience, and needs, and the specific context of use supports or hinders the development of use. Moreover, we discuss how the characteristics of the home settings, in which the televisions studied were situated, represent a challenge to usability work. The concluding discussion leads to a set of hypotheses relevant to designers and researchers who wish to tackle some of the aspects of usability of particular importance to development in the use of home technology.