This paper presents a hopeful perspective on the potentially dramatic impacts of Large Language Models on how we children learn and how they will expect to interact with technology.We review the effects of LLMs on education so far, and make the case that these effects are minor compared to the upcoming changes that are occurring.We present a small scenario and self-ethnographic study demonstrating the effects of these changes, and define five significant considerations that interactive systems designers will have to accommodate in the future.

The coronavirus pandemic drastically changed the lives of people across the globe. It affected almost every aspect of our lives including work, education, entertainment and social life. Although it is beginning to feel like a nightmare that perhaps we imagined, the consequences, largely negative, but a few positive, are still echoing around the world. Many people lost their lives or their livelihoods, many people still have long COVID and there were many other negative consequences. On the more positive side, the pandemic revolutionized remote working, shifted healthcare more rapidly to remote methods and enhanced digital communications, topics very relevant to human–computer interaction (HCI). For HCI, the pandemic had a profound effect on the way we work, in terms of practice, research and education. For long weeks and months, many of us were unable to meet face-to-face with clients, users, participants and students. This meant we had to change the way we worked, conducted research and educated the future generations of HCI and UX practitioners, researchers and educators. But HCI also has considerable potential to contribute to adjusting to life during a pandemic and in a post-pandemic world. As many people have noted, the pandemic would have been much more difficult without digital technologies that allowed many of us to work or study remotely, to stay in touch with family and friends, to consult our medical practitioner, to exercise, entertain ourselves and so on. A wider range of people needed digital technologies than ever before, and new systems needed to be created or adapted very quickly. There were some surprises, such as the sudden usefulness of QR codes, security concerns about many digital platforms (who had heard of ‘Zoombombing’ before the pandemic?) and the even greater explosion of disinformation and misinformation about issues such as the causes and cures for COVID-19 and the safety of vaccines. Without good interactive systems we would not have achieved what we were able to in the long weeks and months of lockdowns, but perhaps better designed interactive systems could have helped prevent the spread of disinformation and misinformation during that time. This special issue of Interacting with Computers addresses both aspects of HCI and the pandemic: how has the pandemic changed practice, research and education in HCI; and how has HCI contributed to solutions, and how can it continue to contribute to solutions as we move through the post-pandemic world. Sixteen papers were selected from more than 40 submissions for the special issue, with authors from 16 different countries covering Asia, Australasia, Europe and both North and South America. Papers cover a broad range of topics, and as we anticipated, address both how we can do HCI research in remote contexts and how HCI can help understand and solution the issues thrown up by this unprecedented context of social isolation. Three papers explored the theme of how we can do HCI research in this remote context. Correa et al. (this issue) and Verma (this issue) explored particular studies conducted remotely and Costagliola et al. (this issue) conducted a survey of how research report in the CHI conference changed in methods due to the pandemic. Another group of papers explored how to use HCI research methods to investigate problems arising from the pandemic, and remote work and study in particular. Turner and Ordonia (this issue) investigated how social media posts can be used as an indirect measure of well-being, by comparing the content of posts before and during the pandemic, while Suhaimi et al. (this issue) investigated the relationship between social media use and people’s intention to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Guidi et al. (this issue) investigated another aspect of social media use during the pandemic, that of the support it offered people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and those caring for these individuals. A large group of papers explored how interactive technologies could be deployed to address the problems that arose from the pandemic and understand the issues of using them. Stenkamp et al. (this issue) conducted research on how immersive video could be used to study whether pedestrians would follow distancing measures in public spaces and Hespanhol (this issue) explored how physical, virtual and hybrid public spaces can be designed to meet distancing and other requirements. Colombo et al. (this issue) explored how digital technologies can support the rapid design of new systems to cope with emergencies such as the pandemic. Rogers et al. (this issue) proposed different ways in which videoconferencing systems could be further developed to create a better experience for remote meeting participants. Barry and Kane (this issue) investigated the problems of remote working for global teams, a problem already before the pandemic, but one which it brought into focus. Gulliksen et al. (this issue) also investigated the effects of remote work, this time in the context of high education. Qin et al. (this issue) investigated a more specific education issue, that of students multitasking during online courses. Gould et al. (this issue) tackled the ongoing problem of how to measure the effectiveness of working remotely in ways acceptable to workers. This is clearly one of many issues accelerated by the pandemic that need further research. Ryan et al. (this issue) also explored a very contentious issue that emerged during the pandemic, the use of digital COVID certificates and the fairness of their use. Finally, Dix et al. (this issue) tackled the very large problem of the difficulties of understanding complex global issues such as the pandemic or the climate crisis and how we can use digital technologies better in supporting decision-making about these issues. As the COVID-19 pandemic hopefully recedes into history, we can see that these papers raise many interesting issues for us to contemplate and research. The pandemic made us consider the ways we work, research, study and relax and how digital technologies support all these activities. It brought some issues that were building into sharp focus and raised new ones due to the particular circumstances we found ourselves in. Hopefully, another situation like this will never occur again, but let us make sure we consider the lessons of this situation so we are better prepared if it does re-occur.

Abstract The use of reminders in habit-formation apps could lead to dependency towards the reminders and hinder the automaticity of the behaviour. Implementation intentions (if–then plan) have been found to be an effective technique that can be used to support forming new habits/breaking unwanted habits. However, implementation intentions could suffer due to forgetfulness and lack of strong intention. In this study, we investigated how adding plan reminders could impact implementation intentions by conducting a 4-week study on daily mood report task. Our findings suggest that adding plan reminders leads to better compliance and better recall of the plan but not necessarily increased automaticity. We also discuss how plan reminders of implementation intentions can be improved. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS Implementation intentions are specific action planning that have been found to be powerful in supporting behaviour change by helping someone to break unwanted habits or form new habits. Implementation intentions could have a weak effect when there is no strong motivation to perform the intended behaviour. Existing habit formation/behaviour change apps focus on using reminders. This could lead to dependency towards the reminder. We propose an alternative approach by sending specific reminders of implementation intention (plan reminders) in advance before the actual action happens. Adding plan reminders on implementation intentions leads to better compliance, however, it is not necessarily the same in term of automaticity.

Digital behaviour change interventions, particularly those using pervasive computing technology, hold great promise in supporting users to change their behaviour. However, most interventions fail to take habitual behaviour into account, limiting their potential impact. This failure is partly driven by a plethora of overlapping behaviour change theories and related strategies that do not consider the role of habits. We critically review the main theories and models used in the research to analyse their application to designing effective habitual behaviour change interventions. We highlight the potential for Dual Process Theory, modern habit theory, and Goal Setting Theory, which together model how users form and break habits, to drive effective digital interventions. We synthesise these theories into an explanatory framework, the Habit Alteration Model, and use it to outline the state of the art. We identify the opportunities and challenges of habit-focused interventions.

Subliminal priming has the potential to influence people's attitudes and behaviour, making them prefer certain choices over others. Yet little research has explored its feasibility on smartphones, even though the global popularity and increasing use of smartphones has spurred interest in mobile behaviour change interventions. This paper addresses technical, ethical and design issues in delivering mobile subliminal priming. We present three explorations of the technique: a technical feasibility study, and two participant studies. A pilot study (n=34) explored subliminal goal priming in-the-wild over 1 week, while a semi-controlled study (n=101) explored the immediate effect of subliminal priming on 3 different types of stimuli. We found that although subliminal priming is technically possible on smartphones, there is limited evidence of impact on changes in how much stimuli are preferred by users, with inconsistent effects across stimuli types. We discuss the implications of our results and directions for future research.

An increasing share of our daily interactions with others is mediated through mobile communication technologies. People communicate via text, emoticons, emojis and rich media such as video. We explore the design of Heartefacts, short video clips composed of highlights determined by heart rate changes while watching videos. Our survey investigated video sharing behaviour, and our feasibility study examined the possibility of detecting highlights in videos by monitoring people's heart rates measured with off-the-shelf wrist-worn sensors. Our results show that people do indeed have measurable responses with respect to their heartbeat patterns to six different emotions elicited by video clips. We compare video highlights verbally identified by our participants to physiological highlights as indicated by their heart rate data and also discuss and compare the automatically generated Heartefacts with video highlights created by an expert in video art. We close with design considerations for Heartefacts in mobile technology.

In the spirit of ongoing improvement and our desire to move the journal forwards, we have undertaken some work which I'm reporting to you here. We have created a set of principles for the journal to focus on: ... We are speeding up review process, by providing faster allocation to the most appropriate editors, quick selection of reviewers, setting a faster turnaround expectation from reviewers, and putting in better systems to support these processes. We are also planning to be able to host data sets related to papers, and other code as needed to help replication and wider dissemination. Referees will, from now on, be notified of the outcome for papers they have refereed, and will also be able to see the anonymised comments from other reviewers. For exceptional reviews that contribute to the development of ideas, we will be inviting reviewers to change their review into a commentary article on the paper (which will itself be citable), which the author will also reply to, thereby giving credit to excellence and engagement. Furthermore, we will be recognising our best reviewers with some form of award.

The impact of simulated embodied agent emotion has been explored in short-term studies, but no work to date has examined its impact in longer interactions that involve multiple interactions with agents. We present an embodied agent (Rachael) that simulates a health professional and attempts to help people improve their fruit and vegetable consumption. Emotional and unemotional versions of the agent were developed to examine how user perceptions of the agent changed over an intervention period of 49 days and in turn how this influenced fruit and vegetable consumption. Results found that whilst participants consumed more daily portions of fruit and vegetables over the intervention period and reduced their consumption gains post-intervention, there was no significant difference in consumption gains over time between those who interacted with the emotional or unemotional agents. Qualitative feedback, however, highlighted a strong preference for the emotional agent. A novelty effect was also observed where the agents were perceived more positively initially and less so over time.

This paper reports findings from participatory design research aimed at uncovering how technological interventions can engage users in the domain of privacy. Our work was undertaken in the context of a new design concept, “Privacy Trends”, whose aspiration is to foster technology users' digital literacy regarding ongoing privacy risks and elucidate how such risks fit within existing social, organizational, and political systems, leading to a longer‐term privacy concern. Our study reveals 2 challenges for privacy intervention design: the need to develop technology users' intrinsic motivations with the privacy domain and the importance of framing the concept of privacy within users' interests. Setting our study within a design context enables us to identify 4 design opportunities for fostering engagement with the privacy domain through technology design.

STEM subjects are typically seen as boring, geeky, difficult to learn and with low relevance to real life. To counter this opinion, we aim to foster engagement with and curiosity about STEM subjects, through an approach to learning that facilitates the construction of understanding of key, threshold concepts (TCs). To achieve this, we engender creativity by using performance as a means of expression. We demonstrate how the process of collaboratively crafting a video to explain a TC students have been introduced to helps them to break down the concept, and through reflection on each piece of knowledge about it, build understanding about its different aspects, and further develop their knowledge. We aim through this approach to encourage students to work together to discover, explore, engage in lateral, visual thinking, and therefore develop deep, shared understanding of TCs in STEM subjects.

Wheelchair users can find accessing digital content on large multi-touch tables particularly difficult and frustrating due to their limited reach. We present work in progress that is exploring the potential of enhancing touch table accessibility through the use of mid-air gesturing technology. An overview of an experimental prototype is provided along with the key findings from an evaluation conducted with fifteen wheelchair users at a public library and heritage centre.

We present work-in-progress that is exploring the potential for visual artists with physical impairments to use new non-intrusive mid-air gesturing sensors to enhance and extend their practice. We highlight the key results from an initial informal user evaluation with two disabled and two non-disabled visual artists examining use of the Leap Motion sensor as an artistic tool. Future work will explore how related technologies can be better utilized to support disabled artists in their practice.

This paper investigates how users respond to emotional expressions displayed by an embodied agent. In a between-subjects experiment (N = 50) an emotionally expressive agent (simulating the role of a nutritional coach) was perceived as significantly more likeable and caring than an unemotional version. Feedback from participants also revealed detailed insights into their perceptions of the agents and highlighted a strong preference for the emotionally expressive version. Design implications for embodied agents are discussed and future research areas identified.

We describe work in progress toward a new approach for multimedia annotation in which the system and user work synergistically together. This work in progress is particularly focused on enabling journalists to efficiently annotate articles for submission to news agencies. Initial work on gathering user requirements is detailed along with several interesting findings that resulted from this process: capturing mood and emotion is needed as well as descriptive content. Important areas for future research are also highlighted and discussed.

In this paper we describe three different design activities carried out for the design of a music device for children. The studies involved researchers from different disciplines as well as children from different schools. We reflected on what happened during the design activities and we looked at the outputs produced by the children in order to understand the feasibility of the activities from two perspectives: whether they contributed to the design of the product and whether they suitably involved children in the process. In relation to the design of the product, information gathered during the activities was associated either to the context or to the content of the design. In relation to the design method, the study enabled us to identify aspects of both children's' engagement and researchers' management that affected the success of the activities. We used these factors to create what we consider a useful framework for meaningful design activities.

Professor Brian Shackel’s paper “Designing for People in the Age of Information” was published in 1984. In his paper, Shackel looked ahead to the research areas that he considered important and makes some predictions for the future. This paper provides a current perspective on his views, assessing which areas he successfully predicted and which he did not, and contextualising his work in the field that he significantly shaped.

This paper provides details of an in-depth investigation into how racing sailors use information displays and devices, and shows that these devices act as communication loci and instigators of action. The paper presents a detailed look at how sailors use instrumentation on their boats for both their own performance and as the foci for developing a shared understanding: this is a detailed study of computer-supported cooperative work in a new environment. We present a brief summary of the ways that technology has pervaded the environs of sailing yachts, and analyze how this has affected the activities of the crew and altered the relationship between the sailors and their environment. We introduce a taxonomy of information processing levels that allows us to understand what information is currently presented and in what form, and provides a basis for us to consider future developments in the field. After presenting the study and some analysis of the use of existing technology, we present a new design that addresses some of the issues identified, and evaluate its impact. The systems are analysed from the perspective of assisting people to improve their performance in training and in race situations. We use a combination of observation, discussion and personal reflection in undertaking the study.

In a study of activity and usage of comparatively complex configurations - where users have multiple screens and/or multiple computers - we have noticed that accounts of what is being observed and reported are tricky to unify within a coherent framework. In this paper we look in detail at one such setting, where a complex office configuration has the machines well spread out in a structure designed by an individual for themselves. The layout also permits pairs of users to work collaboratively and clear cases of co-operative working are observed. In order to describe this successfully, we have extended the distributed cognition approach to capture notions of intent. This Projected Cognition, as we have termed it, allows us to provide a richer description of intent, activity and context.

Embodied agents are often designed with the ability to simulate human emotion. This paper investigates the psychological impact of simulated emotional expressions on computer users with a particular emphasis on how mismatched facial and audio expressions are perceived (e.g. a happy face with a concerned voice). In a within-subjects repeated measures experiment (N = 68), mismatched animations were perceived as more engaging, warm, concerned and happy when a happy or warm face was in the animation (as opposed to a neutral or concerned face) and when a happy or warm voice was in the animation (as opposed to a neutral or concerned voice). The results appear to follow cognitive dissonance theory as subjects attempted to make mismatched expressions consistent on both the visual and audio dimensions of animations, resulting in confused perceptions of the emotional expressions. Design implications for affective embodied agents are discussed and future research areas identified.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of Projected Cognition as an extension to Distributed Cognition. Distributed Cognition is a conceptual framework which can be useful in studying human interactions with artefacts; the idea is that of cognition not bounded by the cranium but instead perfusing artefacts in ways that are recoverable. We argue that this analysis has not been fully understood in relation to the behaviour of humans with artefacts in that the intentionality in behaviour has been ignored. We argue that we need to view the human as sometimes projecting their intention in behaviour onto the artefacts they use, and suggest that this conception permits greater clarity in the study of user behaviour with artefacts such as computers. We illustrate the development with case studies of two users of complex configurations of computers as well as examples drawn from the published literature. We conclude with consideration of some design implications and discussion of related domains in HCI where Projected Cognition could be influential.

Abstract The Internet is a medium for education, entertainment, communication, and personal expression. User behavior has developed three main modalities for using this medium effectively—searching, browsing, and monitoring—which are supported to different degrees by conventional tools. Understanding the nature of the interaction allows us to design and implement a system called Mitsukeru to support browsing behaviors, while retaining the free‐form movements between other interaction styles. The system uses agent‐based modeling and look‐ahead to provide informative yet nonintrusive guidance to the user, and is described in detail.

In previous work, the first author argued for simple lightweight visualisations. These are surprisingly complex to produce due to the need for infrastructure to read files, etc. onCue, a desktop 'agent', aids the rapid production of such visualisations and their integration with desktop and Internet applications. Two examples are used dancing histograms for 2D tables and pieTrees for hierarchical numeric data. A major focus is the importance of architecture, both that of onCue itself and the underlying component infrastructure on which it is built — separation of concerns, mixed initiative computation and plug-and-play components lead to easily produced and easily used systems.

This paper describes a system that uses visualisation to assist a user in dealing with the information returned from a search engine. The user's queries, and the documents they return, are represented by a 3D spatial structure that shows their relationships and provides a way of accessing and exploring the documents retrieved. It is implemented to work with the New Zealand Digital Library, a set of large document collections that is available over the Web. The visualisation scheme is a Java applet that is updated dynamically whenever the user makes a new search, and can be browsed alongside the search engine.

Describes the bathymetric imaging and processing of the GLORI-B system. GLORI-B (Geological LOng-Range Imagery and Bathymetry) is a deep ocean sidescan sonar surveying device, which is able to produce bathymetry measurements and images of the seafloor in swaths of up to 30 km wide. The basics of the GLORI-B system are described, and then the various stages of processing the received data to transform it into a geographically registered bathymetric record are given. A brief discussion of the major sources of error is also provided.>