The notion of explainable user interfaces (XUI) has been proposed as a way to address the growing complexity and unpredictability of many UIs. A key question is whether this aspirational goal can be achieved with reasonable amounts of development effort. This paper takes React as its focus as it is one the most widely used web development frameworks. It shows through practical demonstration that the existing event mechanisms within React can be repurposed with the addition of a small amount of annotation to implement one of the proposed XUI techniques.

This paper summarises the third edition of the SYNERGY workshop on Designing and Building Hybrid Human-AI Systems, held at AVI 2026 in Venice, Italy. The workshop addresses the critical challenge of designing AI systems that genuinely augment human capabilities through meaningful combination, moving beyond approaches where humans function as mere cogs in the machine. Directly aligned with AVI 2026's theme of "Interactive Creativity: Agencies, Interfaces, and Ethics", the workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to advance both theoretical frameworks and practical implementations that preserve human agency while leveraging AI's computational power.

In this article, we report on a 3-year endeavor that fostered 18 collaborations between academic and non-academic organizations to co-create responses to social (in)justice issues in digital societies. The projects and range of individuals and organizations connected to this program offer a snapshot of the state of social justice thinking within the UK digital economy research sector. Our analysis shows how the program’s constellations of actions enacted different modes of resistance attempting to reshape people’s relationship to power dynamics, addressing institutions and exposing systems, and developing and restoring values for social justice. We explore how these efforts invite nuanced understanding of what constitutes resistance in knowledge co-production endeavors and how they helped surface tensions at the intersection of agencies and the distribution of responsibilities. Drawing from our insights and experience, we discuss implications for HCI concerned with the creation of the conditions for social justice in our digital societies.

Numbers are part of day-to-day life, from household budgeting to climate change. But, for many, dealing with numeric information is daunting, with multiple step changes in complexity as well as managing information sources. This paper explores this space through an ecosystem of interconnected prototype tools: TSoW interpreting orders of magnitude; calQ, a four-function calculator that shifts seamlessly to micro-spreadsheet; WS2 embedding spreadsheet-like features in web pages; and myData collating and connecting the diverse data sources. Collectively, these offer an envisionment to prompt discussion both of how end-users can more easily deal with numeric information and of the necessary technical infrastructure.

This workshop explores the evolving landscape of Human-AI collaboration, focusing on Advanced Visual Interfaces and Artificial Intelligence to enhance human cognition. We explore synergistic models of collaboration that merge human insights with AI capabilities, addressing ethical dimensions and practical AI applications. Our goal is to foster rich interdisciplinary dialogue and challenge existing paradigms of human-machine interaction. We aim to redefine interaction paradigms and establish new benchmarks for intelligent systems, ensuring AI not only supports but significantly augments human decision-making processes.

Abstract This paper draws on diverse psychological, behavioural and numerical literature to understand some of the challenges we all face in making sense of large-scale phenomena and use this to create a road map for HCI responses. This body of knowledge offers tools and principles that can help HCI researchers deliver value now, but also highlights challenges for future HCI research. The paper is framed by looking at patterns and information that highlight some of the common misunderstandings that arise—not just for politicians and the general public but also for many in the academic community. This paper does not have all the answers to this, but we hope it provides some and, perhaps more importantly, raises questions that we need to address as scientific and technical communities.

The technologies we use in everyday contexts are designed and tested, using existing standards of usability. As technology advances standards are still based on planar displays and simple screen-based interactions. End-user digital devices need to consider context and physicality as additional influences on design. Additionally, accessibility and multi-modal interaction must be considered as we build technologies with interactions such as soundscapes to support user experience. When considering the tools we use to design existing interactions, we can evaluate new ways of working with software to support the development of the changing face of interactive devices. This paper presents two prototypes which explore the space of user experience design tools, first in the space of contextual cues when looking at multi device interaction, and second, in the space of physical prototyping. These prototypes are starting points for a wider discussion around the changing face of usability. We also discuss extending the scope of existing user experience design tools and rethinking what ”user experience” means when the devices we own are becoming ’aware’ of their surroundings, context, and have increasing agency.

As cultures and individuals, we look back to look forward, explicitly using lessons of the past to guide our future decisions. In this 30th anniversary of the AVI conference we can also look back in order to make the next 30 years even better. In 1996 I gave a keynote at the third AVI, both describing my own work in formal modelling of user interactions, and also pondering variations of ‘advanced visual interfaces’, imagining advanced aural and advanced nasal interfaces. This was part playful but also serious, uncovering the way our different senses give us different cuts through space and time. In particular, smell is deeply associated with memory both personal and spatial – that is history.

Many of the issues in the modern world are complex and multifaceted: migration, banking, not to mention climate change and Covid.Furthermore, social-media, which at first seemed to offer more reliable 'on the ground' citizen journalism, has instead become a seedbed of dis-information.Trust in media has plummeted, just when it has become essential.This is a problem, but also an opportunity for research in HCI that can make a real difference in the world.The majority of work in this area, from various disciplines including datascience, AI and HCI, is focused on combatting misinformation -fighting back against bad actors.However, we should also think about doing better -helping good actors to curate, disseminate and comprehend information better.There is exciting work in this area, but much still to do.

AVI2CH is a meeting place for researchers and practitioners focusing on the application of advanced information and communication technology in cultural heritage (CH) with a specific focus on user interfaces, visualization and interaction. It builds on a series of PATCH workshops, since 2007 including three at AVI and also a series of European workshops on cultural informatics. Eleven papers range from novel interfaces in museums to wider community engagement; all share a common mission to ensure that the latest digital technology helps preserve the past in ways that enrich the lives of current and future generations

This paper proposes first steps in the development of practical techniques for the expert evaluation of long-term interactions driven by the need to perform expert evaluation of such systems in a consultancy framework. Some interactions are time-limited and goal-driven, for example withdrawing money at an ATM. However, these are typically embedded within longer-term interactions, such as with the banking system as a whole. We have numerous evaluation and design tools for the former, but long-term interaction is less well served. To fill this gap new evaluation prompts are presented, drawing on the style of cognitive walkthroughs to support extended interaction.

Over the years, the HCI Educators series has studied a number of challenges for the teaching and learning of Human-Computer Interaction at a time of radical educational change. Though video has historically played an important part on the teaching and development of HCI, only recently video-making and editing technologies have become accessible in an unprecedented way, allowing students to become proficient video "prosumers" (producers and consumers). Further, there are numerous educational gains to be had through these technologies. Through a very interactive workshop we explore how can video be used in practice to leverage skills and foster creativity whilst facilitating knowledge acquisition.

The evaluation of research artefacts is an important step to validate research contributions. Sub-disciplines of HCI often pursue primary goals other than usability, such as Sustainable HCI (SHCI), HCI for development, or health and wellbeing. For such disciplines, established evaluation methods are not always appropriate or sufficient, and new conventions for identifying, discussing, and justifying suitable evaluation methods need to be established. In this paper, we revisit the purpose and goals of evaluation in HCI and SHCI, and elicit five key elements that can provide guidance to identifying evaluation methods for SHCI research. Our essay is meant as a starting point for discussing current and improving future evaluation practice in SHCI; we also believe it holds value for other subdisciplines in HCI that encounter similar challenges while evaluating their research.

Experimental preregistration is required for publication in many scientific disciplines and venues. When experimental intentions are preregistered, reviewers and readers can be confident that experimental evidence in support of reported hypotheses is not the result of HARKing, which stands for Hypothesising After the Results are Known. We review the motivation and outcomes of experimental preregistration across a variety of disciplines, as well as previous work commenting on the role of evaluation in HCI research. We then discuss how experimental preregistration could be adapted to the distinctive characteristics of Human-Computer Interaction empirical research, to the betterment of the discipline.

The Technology on the Trail workshop will examine the encroachment of technology into hiking and outdoor adventures, with a focus on identifying and developing ways for technology to support positive and mutually beneficial connections among people. These connections include both intentional ones helpful in collecting scientific data, supporting the environment, maintaining safety, and sharing via social media. We will also explore more opportunistic connections, such as those that are leveraged when tracking and sharing biometric or geotemporal data. With the inclusion of technology in places where it is not used and sometimes not welcome, there will be mismatches of ethics and values that must be considered in the design and use of technology. The workshop will examine existing and emerging challenges of bringing technology onto the trail and reflect on ways to understand, design, and deploy appropriate technological solutions moving forward.

This commentary discusses the article “The Meaning of Interactivity—Some Proposals for Definitions and Measures” by Lars-Erik Janlert and Erik Stolterman (2017). This article is very timely, as use...

Although growing numbers of researchers are studying the role of social engagement in ubiquitous technologies and applications, few frameworks have been proposed that attend to the lived experience of the individual and social dynamic within which it is intimately enmeshed. We present empirical insights using grounded theory from data gathered during a 102-day walk of the second author around Wales. This study inductively developed a substantive social engagement framework of the Walking experience that appears to be simple and flexible. The main aim of this paper is to present the developed framework, where even apparently 'solitary' walking is set within a rich technical and social matrix. The primary characteristics of this framework, namely accuracy of social judgements, accountability of decisions and actions, enhancing self-esteem, and satisfying intrinsic motivation goals, are in line with social user experience and show promise of being useful in ubiquitous technologies, regardless of user activity.

Affordance is an important concept in the field of human–computer interaction. There are various interpretations of affordances, often extending the original notion of James J. Gibson. Often the treatment of affordances in the current human–computer interaction literature has been a one-to-one relationship between a user and an artefact. We believe that the social and cultural contexts within which an artefact is situated affect the way in which the artefact is used and the notion of affordance needs to be seen as a dynamic, always emerging relationship between people and their environment. Using a Structuration Theory approach, we conceptualize the notion of affordance at a much broader level, encompassing social and cultural aspects. We suggest that affordances should be seen at three levels: single user, organizational (or work group) and societal. Focusing on the organizational level affordances, we provide details of several important factors that affect the emergence of affordances.

Spreadsheets are ubiquitous, familiar, often overlooked, and embody vast financial and human investment, not least in their user interface. This paper shows how spreadsheets can be used as an integral part of interactive processes, for activities from simple data entry, to more complex grouping and linking of datasets, both as fully functional prototypes and as part of a final system. They reveal artful digital and physical end-user appropriation; exemplify key design principles including 'appropriate intelligence', ensuring 'smart' technology fits the complete human--computer process; and expose further design issues such as the importance of 'exception' sets.

While educational technology has a long pedigree, the last few years have seen dramatic changes. These have included the rise and institutionalisation of MOOCs, and other web-based initiatives such as Kahn Academy and Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU). Classrooms have also been transformed with growing use of mobile devices and forms of flipped classroom; and educational progress and engagement has been increasingly measured leading to institutional and individual learning analytics. This workshop seeks to understand the interaction of these issues with human--computer interaction in a number of ways. First to ask what HCI has to contribute to these in terms of the design of authoring and learning platforms, and the wider socio-political implications of increasingly metric-driven governance? Second to discuss how will these changes affect HCI education? Together practice-based and theoretical approaches will help us build a clear understanding of the current state and future challenges for educational technology and HCI.

While MOOCs and other forms of large-scale learning are of growing importance, the vast majority of tertiary students still study in traditional face-to-face settings. This paper examines some of the challenges in attempting to apply the benefits of large-scale learning to these settings, building on a growing repository of cross-institutional data.

The segment of companies providing storage services and hardware for end users and small businesses has been growing in the past few years. Cloud storage, personal network‐attached storage (NAS), and external hard drives are more affordable than ever before and one would think that backing up personal digital information is a straightforward process nowadays. Despite this, small group studies and corporate surveys show the opposite. In this paper we present the results from a quantitative and qualitative survey of 319 participants about how they back up their personal computers and restore personal information in case of computer failures. The results show that the majority of users do manual, selective, and noncontinuous backups, rely on a set of planned and unplanned backups (as a consequence of other activities), have inadequate knowledge about possible solutions and implications of using known solutions, and so on. The study also reveals that around a fifth of all computers are not backed up, and a quarter of most important files and a third of most important folders at the time of the survey could not be (fully) restored in the event of computer failure. Based on the results, several implications for practice and research are presented.

In many parts of the world, the electricity supply industry makes the task of dealing with unpredictable spikes and dips in production and demand invisible to consumers, maintaining a seemingly unlimited supply. A future increase in reliance on time-variable renewable sources of electricity may lead to greater fluctuations in supply. We engaged remote islanders as equal partners in a research project that investigated through technology-mediated enquiry the topic of synchronising energy consumption with supply, and together built a prototype renewable energy forecast display. A number of participants described a change in their practices, saving high energy tasks for times when local renewable energy was expected to be available, despite having no financial incentive to do so. The main contributions of this paper are in: 1) the results of co-development sessions exploring systems supporting synchronising consumption with supply and 2) the findings arising from the deployment of the prototype.

Nowadays we are continuously surrounded by new digital systems featuring easy to use and engaging interaction modalities, such as multi-touch, gesture, tangible, or voice interaction. The enriched and natural experience provided by this new paradigm - known as Natural User Interface - has promoted its adoption in many ubiquitous contexts due to its effectiveness in dealing with a wide audience of mostly inexperienced users; Pervasive Displays, namely variously-sized displays ecosystems supporting simultaneous interactions with public screens naturally use those new paradigms. Nonetheless, if we want these systems to stay out in public spaces for long periods of time, they must provide users with an easy way of being adapted to their heterogeneous usage contexts. In this paper, we propose an End- User Programming approach to this problem introducing TAPAS, a system that combines a tangible interaction with a puzzle metaphor, allowing users to create workflows on a Pervasive Display to satisfy their needs; we also carried out a preliminary evaluation of our system with second year university students and interaction designers, gathering useful feedback to improve TAPAS and employ it in many other domains.

Personal Information Management (PIM) refers to the practice and the study of how people acquire, organize, maintain, retrieve, archive and discard information for various reasons in physical and digital worlds. Many PIM tools are available for managing information on our desktop computers while many research prototypes have tried to augment or replace them. The development of these tools was based on knowledge drawn from the fields of psychology, human–computer interaction, information retrieval, knowledge management and research in the PIM field. Different metaphors and ways of organizing were introduced. However, the prevailing beliefs are that most of these prototypes were not extensively tested and that the radical design (not addressing real-world issues) and quick abandonment of prototypes prevented transfer to mainstream products. This paper looks at what has been developed and learnt, what has been transferred to mainstream applications, discusses the possible reasons behind these trends and challenges some parts of the above-mentioned beliefs.

This paper discusses the design, development and deployment of a large projected multi-touch surface within a rural context. Based on our previous work we deployed the system and worked in a real world setting in order to understand how it might be used in this particular scenario and to further understand the issues involved in using such systems in a rural context. Such systems are often deployed in urban or lab-based scenarios, however rural settings come with their own set of issues that can often make them very different in terms of design implications from urban settings, and it is important to understand how these issues can impact upon both the design of the interface and the whole system. This innovative research engaged with the local community and this enabled us to further understand how we might advance the use of the system, in terms of its interface, software architecture and physical design. This paper discusses the impetus for the design of the system, the methods we used to frame our studies, the technical development and design of the system, and some findings from the actual deployment.

Advances in ubiquitous technologies have changed the way humans interact with the world around them. Technology has the power not only to inform and perform but also to further peoples' experiences of the world. It has enhanced the methodological approaches within the CHI research realm in terms of data gathering (e.g. via wearable sensors) and sharing (e.g. via self-reflection methods). While such methodologies have been mainly adopted in isolation, exploring the implications and the synergy of them has yet to be fully explored. This workshop brings together a multidisciplinary group of researchers to explore and experience the use of wearable sensors with self-reflection as a multi-method approach to conduct research and fully experience the world on-the-go.

This paper describes Asynchronous Active Values (AAV), a framework for the production of reactive web interfaces that use API-based web service back-ends. Such interfaces are now becoming common due to API-oriented application development and more sophisticated post-Web2.0 mashups. A significant feature of such interfaces is the need for feedback when parts of the page display are in some way temporarily invalid, or in flux, while potentially slow API calls are responding to requests. AAV extends existing methods such as access-oriented programming and the observer pattern, by including a 'changing' event in addition to the normal 'onChange' to enable intermediate feedback.

An increasing number of interactive displays of very different sizes, portability, projectability and form factors are starting to become part of the display ecosystems that we make use of in our daily lives. Displays are shaped by human activity into an ecological arrangement and thus an ecology. Each combination or ecology of displays offer substantial promise for the creation of applications that effectively take advantage of the wide range of input, affordances, and output capability of these multi-display, multi-device and multi-user environments. Although the last few years have seen an increasing amount of research in this area, knowledge about this subject remains under explored, fragmented, and cuts across a set of related but heterogeneous issues. This workshop brings together researchers and practitioners interested in the challenges posed by infrastructure and design.

The web is an integral part of our daily lives, and has had profound impacts on us all, not least both positive and negative impacts on accessibility, inclusivity and social justice. However, the web is constantly changing. Web2.0 has brought the web into the heart of social life, and has had mixed impact on accessibility. More recently the rise in API access to web services and various forms of open, linked or semantic data is creating a more data/content face to the media web. As with all technology, this new data web poses fresh challenges and offers new opportunities

Interactive displays are increasingly distributed in a broad spectrum of everyday life environments: They have very diverse form factors and portability characteristics, support a variety of interaction techniques, and can be used by a variable number of people. The coupling of multiple displays can thus create interactive "ecosystems" which mingle in the social context, and generate novel settings of communication, performance and ownership. The objective of this workshop is to focus on the range of research challenges and opportunities afforded by applications that rely on visual interfaces that can spread across multiple displays. Such displays are physically decoupled (i.e. connected to multiple computers) yet are visually coupled due to the interfaces and interactions they support. This can range from visual interfaces spread across multiple small private input displays (e.g. information exchange or game play) to small private displays coupled with larger public displays (e.g. public photo sharing).

The International Workshop on Semantic Models for Adaptive Interactive Systems (SEMAIS 2010) aims to identify emerging trends in interactive system design using semantic models.

This paper represents a personal view of the state of HCI as a design discipline and as a scientific discipline, and how this is changing in the face of new technological and social situations. Going back 20 years a frequent topic of discussion was whether HCI was a ‘discipline’. It is unclear whether this was ever a fruitful topic, but academic disciplines are effectively about academic communities and there is ample evidence of the long-term stability of the international HCI/CHI community. However, as in computer ‘science’, the central scientific core of HCI is perhaps still unclear; for example, a strength of HCI is the closeness between theory and practice, but the corresponding danger is that the two are often confused. The paper focuses particularly on the challenge of methodological thinking in HCI, especially as the technological and social context of HCI rapidly changes. This is set alongside two other challenges: the development of reliable knowledge in HCI and the clear understanding of interlinked human roles within the discipline. As a case study of the need for methodological thinking, the paper considers the use of single person studies in research and design. These are likely to be particularly valuable as we move from a small number of applications used by many people to a ‘long tail’ where large numbers of applications are used by small numbers of people. This change calls for different practical design strategies; focusing on the peak experience of a few rather than acceptable performance for many. Moving back to the broader picture, as we see more diversity both in terms of types of systems and kinds of concerns, this may also be an opportunity to reflect on what is core across these; potential fragmentation becoming a locus to understand more clearly what defines HCI, not just for the things we see now, but for the future that we cannot see.

Public displays are becoming increasingly commonplace, yet recent studies place the effectiveness and user acceptance of them into doubt. This paper motivates the need for a new class of display technology that can more effectively blend with its environment and introduces the concept of self-organizing emergent displays as a vehicle to achieving this. The paper goes on to briefly describe Firefly, a prototype emergent display system, and evaluate its scalability, effectiveness, and user acceptance through experimental analysis and a field trial.

Abstract This paper explores the formal specification of the physical behaviour of devices ‘unplugged’ from their digital effects. By doing this we seek to better understand the nature of physical interaction and the way this can be exploited to improve the design of hybrid devices with both physical and digital features. We use modified state transition networks of the physical behaviour, which we call physiograms, and link these to parallel diagrams of the digital state. These are used to describe a number of features of physical interaction exposed by previous work and relevant properties expressed using a formal semantics of the diagrams. As well as being an analytic tool, the physigrams have been used in a case study where product designers used and adapted them as part of the design process.

We live in an increasingly digital world yet our bodies and minds are naturally designed to interact with the physical. The products of the 21st century are and will be a synthesis of digital and physical elements embedded in new physical and social environments. As we design more hybrid physical/digital products, the distinctions for the user become blurred. It is therefore increasingly important that we understand what we gain, lose or confuse by the added digitality. Digitally augmented physical artefacts can be tailored and adapted to operate within a wide range of ecological settings. However, they also become more complex and require a fairly intensive design process to make them not simply practical and functional but also engaging. As a result, the need becomes even more pressing to comprehend the underlying computational intricacies, the physical form, properties and behaviour, the physical and social contexts, and the issues of aesthetics and creativity.

Computers have become part of our homes and day-to-day lives. This paper presents selected results of an interview-based user study focused on information management on the personal computer. We focus on the Desktop, confirming results of previous studies as well as revealing new issues and ensuing design suggestions. While even basic competence users inventively appropriated the desktop, some features, in particular user-defined shortcuts, appeared counter-intuitive, and were underused. Users are still dissatisfied with their information organization and the challenge is to provide tools that support rather than replace the users 'flexible and creative use of the current desktop.

Traditional database query formulation is intensional: at the level of schemas, table and column names. Previous work has shown that filters can be created using a query paradigm focused on interaction with data tables. This paper presents a technique, Query-through-Drilldown, to enable join formulation in a data-oriented paradigm. Instead of formulating joins at the level of schemas, the user drills down through tables of data and the query is implicitly created based on the user's actions. Query-through-Drilldown has been applied to a large relational database, but similar techniques could be applied to semi-structured data or semantic web ontologies.

With information abundance the user's desktop is often cluttered with files and folders. Existing tools partially address the clutter problem. Time2Hide enhances desktop functionality by allowing icons that are not used for a long time to gradually fade and merge with the background. This aims to alleviate the problem of icon clutter. Users can also perform spatial searches, defining areas of the desktop they wish to search for icons; can reveal one or more hidden files or can go back in time animating the desktop and its changes. With Time2Hide users can still use the desktop as a place for storing files and folders, without worrying about the possible clutter and without being afraid that the files might be moved to an unknown location. The new desktop has been implemented and evaluated. Evaluation results reveal that such an enhanced desktop can significantly support users and propose suggestions for further improvements.

I am very pleased to be able to respond to Blay Whitby’s article as it introduces an extremely important topic. It is important for two reasons. First because artificial agents, from avatars on airport touch-screens to domestic robots are becoming part of our lives and we need to understand the ethical implications of this. Second because the ‘nearly human but not quite’ nature of these agents pushes us to make distinctions that are not a problem when we compare humans with stones, humans with cars, or even humans with animals – by understanding the ethics of robots and agents we may better understand ourselves. In Whitby’s article there are four main actors: a person (P), a robot/agent (R), human third parties (T) and the robot’s designer (D). Whitby deals initially with the case when P acts in a bad way to R and the moral question is framed largely in terms of whether this directly or indirectly causes harm to T, and if so whether this should be prevented. Towards the end of the article Whitby deals with the question of D’s ethical responsibility in that D’s design of R may lead to effects on either P or T that are deemed wrong.

This article focuses on our exploration of awareness issues through the design and long-term deployment of two systems: the Hermes office door display system (which enabled staff in a university department to post awareness messages to their door displays) and SPAM (a messaging system for supporting coordination between staff at two associated residential community care facilities). In the case of both systems, a significant number of the messages sent could be classified as relating to awareness. Furthermore, with both systems, the situatedness of displays (outside office doors in the case of Hermes and in staff offices in the case of SPAM) had a significant impact on the design and subsequent use of the deployed systems. In particular, the placement of displays provided significant context for awareness messages, including, for example, the identity of the sender of the message and the intended audience of the message. Both systems highlight the need for interaction methods that fit in with both normal working practices (and unplanned events) and that enable the user to manage communication channels. The need for appropriate levels of expressiveness and user control is also apparent: We present numerous examples of users controlling the precision of awareness information and sending awareness messages that have as much to do with playfulness as supporting coordination through activity awareness.

Information visualisation is about gaining insight into data through a visual representation. This data is often multivariate and increasingly, the datasets are very large. To help us explore all this data, numerous visualisation applications, both commercial and research prototypes, have been designed using a variety of techniques and algorithms. Whether they are dedicated to geo-spatial data or skewed hierarchical data, most of the visualisations need to adopt strategies for dealing with overcrowded displays, brought about by too much data to fit in too small a display space. This paper analyses a large number of these clutter reduction methods, classifying them both in terms of how they deal with clutter reduction and more importantly, in terms of the benefits and losses. The aim of the resulting taxonomy is to act as a guide to match techniques to problems where different criteria may have different importance, and more importantly as a means to critique and hence develop existing and new techniques.

Previous work has demonstrated the use of random sampling in visualising large data sets and the practicality of a sampling lens in enabling focus+context viewing. Autosampling was proposed as a mechanism to maintain constant density within the lens without user intervention. However, this requires rapid calculation of density or clutter. This paper defines clutter in terms of the occlusion of plotted points and evaluates three possible occlusion metrics that can be used with parallel coordinate plots. An empirical study showed the relationship between these metrics was independent of location and could be explained with a surprisingly simple probabilistic model.

Mobile experiences that take place in public settings such as on city streets create new opportunities for interweaving the fictional world of a performance or game with the everyday physical world. A study of a touring performance reveals how designers generated excitement and dramatic tension by implicating bystanders and encouraging the (apparent) crossing of normal boundaries of behaviour. The study also shows how designers dealt with associated risks through a process of careful orchestration. Consequently, we extend an existing framework for designing spectator interfaces with the concept of performance frames, enabling us to distinguish audience from bystanders. We conclude that using ambiguity to blur the frame can be a powerful design tactic, empowering players to willingly suspend disbelief, so long as a safety-net of orchestration ensures that they do not stray into genuine difficulty.

We have previously shown that random sampling is an effective clutter reduction technique and that a sampling lens can facilitate focus+context viewing of particular regions. This demands an efficient method of estimating the overlap or occlusion of large numbers of intersecting lines in order to automatically adjust the sampling rate within the lens. This paper proposes several ways for measuring occlusion in parallel coordinate plots. An empirical study into the accuracy and efficiency of the occlusion measures show that a probabilistic approach combined with a 'binning' technique is very fast and yet approaches the accuracy of the more expensive 'true' complete measurement.

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in today's mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area - despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study involving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community.

Users of mobile tour guides often express a strong desire for the system to be able to provide information on arbitrary objects they encounter during their visit - akin to pointing to a building or attraction and saying "what's that ?" to a human tour guide. This paper reports on a field study in which we investigated user reaction to the use of digital image capture and recognition to support such functionality. Our results provide an insight into usage patterns and likely user reaction to mobile tour guides that use digital photography for real-time object recognition. These results include the counter-intuitive observation that a significant class of users appear happy to use image recognition even when this is a more complex, lengthy and error-prone process than traditional solutions. Careful analysis of user behavior during the field trails also provides evidence that it may be possible to classify tourists according to the methods by which they prefer to acquire information about tourist attractions in their vicinity. If shown to be generally true these results have important implications for designers of future mobile tour guide systems.

This paper describes two visualisation algorithms that give an impression of current activity on a web site. Both focus on giving a sense of the trail of individual visitors within the web space and showing their navigation paths. Past web activity is used to produce a spatial mapping of pages, which results in highly traversed page links lying close together in the 2D visualisation space. Pages visited by typical individual visitors thus form intelligible paths when plotted in the visualisation space. Both techniques attempt to enhance user awareness and experience, but they differ in their balance between utility and aesthetics.

This paper presents a technique, the Quantum Web Field, designed to give an ambient visualisation of the current activity on a Web site. It uses the paths of past visitors to the site and a self-organising map to build a diffuse 'probabilistic' mapping of pages to cells in a 2D matrix, where highly traversed page-links tend to be closer to each other. The paths of current visitors appear as intelligible trails giving a sense of purposeful human activity rather than offering detailed analysis. The visualisation is not constrained by either the complexity or the number of pages in the site.

This paper explores children's understanding as a resource and inspiration for interface design and beyond. From children we can understand innate intelligences and skills, including a sense of number and the nature of play. Play is possibly one of the origins of imagination, which in turn is essential for our own creative thought. Surprisingly few adults engage in creative play, but it is when adult-like rationality and child-like imagination meet that we can best produce effective and innovative solutions. Even writing a paper has aspects of playfulness, such as the puzzle of phrasing an abstract in exactly one hundred words... or so.

The use of random algorithms in many areas of computer science has enabled the solution of otherwise intractable problems. In this paper we propose that random sampling can make the visualisation of large datasets both more computationally efficient and more perceptually effective. We review the explicit uses of randomness and the related deterministic techniques in the visualisation literature. We then discuss how sampling can augment existing systems. Furthermore, we demonstrate a novel 2D zooming interface - the Astral Telescope Visualiser, a visualisation suggested and enabled by sampling. We conclude by considering some general usability and technical issues raised by sampling-based visualisation.

Information visualisation systems often have to cope with presenting large amounts of data. In this paper we look at the problem of reducing the display density through the use of random sampling. We review some of the uses of sampling and examine density reduction techniques currently used in visualisation. We then look at a proposed novel visualisation that utilises sampling and discuss many issues that arise. Furthermore, we propose the /spl zeta/DB sampling database architecture and demonstrate how this can be used to enhance current visualisation applications. Finally, we describe the architecture of a sampling aware application and illustrate its advantages.

In its early days, the Internet was a means for transferring data between academic and military computers and communicating largely via messages. The Internet could also be, for the technological elite, a means to contact and interact with remote computers. With the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, the paradigm shifted to one of publishing; not like traditional media owned and organised by a powerful elite, but instead a decentralised and open environment. As the web has matured, static pages have given way to interactive sites that change depending on world events, that animate, that react to what we do. As access to the Internet moves out from the computer to mobile phones, television and games consoles, we are forced to constantly re-evaluate the nature of ‘the web’ and what it will become. Sometimes it seems that the progress of technology is outstripping our understanding of it. It is precisely because of this that more fundamental and analytic views of this dynamic topic are necessary. Only by establishing deep understanding can we hope to reapply that knowledge to a shifting world.

The massive interest in the Web as an active and interactive experience is reflected in the fact that this special issue needed to come in two parts. However, the pace of change over the last year or two is rapidly turning Active Web1 For more about the Active Web including links to papers from the Active Web conference in 1999 and related material see:" locator-type="URL"〉

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 article considers the importance of context in mobile systems. It considers a range of context-related issues and focus on location as a key issue for mobile systems. A design framework is described consisting of taxonomies of location, mobility, population, and device awareness. The design framework inorms the construction of a semantic model of space for mobile systems. The semantic model is reflected in a computational model built on a distriuted platform that allows contextual information to be shared across a number of mobile devices. The framework support the design of interactive mobile systems while the platform supports their rapid development.

Interactive visualisation has been one of the most exciting areas in HCI over recent years. The key term here is 'interactive', and in this paper we assert that virtually any static representation can become more powerful by the addition of simple interactive elements. This is demonstrated by adding interactivity to standard representations including stacked histograms, pie charts and scatter plots. We show how adding interactivity can help resolve many of the trade-offs inherent in static visualisations by allowing multiple options to be available and most importantly for them to be interactively related. Many years of creativity and effort have been invested in traditional generic and bespoke visualisations. Adding interactivity leverages this accumulated experience, but also adds an extra dimension.

Article Free Access Share on Exploring the design space for notification servers Authors: Devina Ramduny School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UK School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UKView Profile , Alan Dix School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UK School of Computing, Staffordshire University, Stafford ST18 ODG UKView Profile , Tom Rodden Computing Department SECaMS, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR UK Computing Department SECaMS, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YR UKView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '98: Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1998 Pages 227–235https://doi.org/10.1145/289444.289497Published:01 November 1998Publication History 25citation519DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations25Total Downloads519Last 12 Months21Last 6 weeks7 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 SiteeReaderPDF

Most work in HCI focuses on interaction in the small: where tasks take a few minutes or hours and individual actions receive feedback within seconds. In contrast, many collaborative activities occur over weeks or months and the turnaround of individual messages may take hours, days or even weeks. This slow pace of interaction brings its own problems, especially when expected responses do not occur. This paper analyses these problems, focusing on the triggers which initiate activities and the way processes recover when triggers are missed or misinterpreted. Furthermore, we are able to consider processes which cross organisational boundaries. We draw on theoretical analysis, an exploratory case study of conference organisation and recent application of the techniques to a student placement office. During the studies, a pattern of recurrent activities was discovered, the 4Rs (request, receipt, response and release), which we believe to be generic to this class of collaborative process.

No abstract available.

In this paper we investigate the appropriateness of formal specification languages for the description of user interface phenomena. Specifically, we are concerned with the distinction between continuously available information, which we call status, and atomic, non-persistent information, which we call events. We propose a hybrid model and notation to address status and event phenomena symmetrically. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this model for designing and understanding mixed control interaction, an especially important topic in the design of multi-user systems.

Abstract This paper presents a pair of algorithms for output and input of pointer structures in binary format. Both algorithms operate in linear space and time. They have been inspired by copying garbage collection algorithms, and make similar assumptions about the representations of pointer structures. In real programs, the transfer of entire pointer structures is often inappropriate. The algorithms are extended to transfer partitions of a pointer structure lazily: the receiver requests partitions when it needs them. A remote procedure call mechanism is presented that uses the binary transfer algorithms for communicating arguments and results. A use of this as an enabling mechanism in the implementation of a software engineering environment is discussed.

This article is concerned with an analysis of the requirements for text-based on-line conferencing. From a system perspective, text-based on-line conferencing can be viewed as either message passing or data sharing. These complementary views give rise to different design dimensions. For example, the message-passing view is concerned with granularity, channels, message labels, and so on. The data-sharing view is concerned with the access different individuals have to the text: read only, appending, editing, pointing, and so on. A deliberately sparse prototype was built and placed in this design space. This minimal prototype has limited functionality so that the real problems experienced by users can show through. Relevant literature from disciplines such as social psychology, conversational analysis, and linguistics is briefly reviewed in terms of three generic communication tasks: synchronizing communication, maintaining structural coherence, and maintaining referents. An empirical analysis of subjects' use of the sparse prototype was analyzed to establish the relevance of the generic communication tasks to text-based on-line conferencing. Possible forms that support for these tasks might take are discussed.

The problems associated with the provision of an undo support facility in the context of a synchronous shared or group editor are investigated. Previous work on the development of formal models of ‘undo’ has been restricted to single user systems and has focused on the functionality of undo, as opposed to discussing the support that users require from any error recovery facility. Motivated by new issues that arise in the context of computer supported co-operative work, the authors aim to integrate formal modelling of undo with an analysis of how users understand undo facilities. Together, these combined perspectives of the system and user lead to concrete design advice for implementing an undo facility. The special issues that arise in the context of shared undo also shed light on the emphasis that should be placed on single user undo. In particular, the authors regard undo not as a system command to be implemented, but as a user intention to be supported by the system.