This work responds to isolating urban places, and contributes new ways for thinking about placemaking. Progressing through autoethnography and prototyping, we critique design proposals with Lefebvre’s theory of utopia. There inhabitants can enjoy and shape their place together without risking depletion of their abilities and motivations to do so. The critique produces political sensibilities that help us make sense of common tensions among inhabitants, landowners, and visitors, and generate possible responses. The critique process itself illustrates how designing through critique with theory can help us think in new ways. This paper contributes a display of how design with critical theory can happen, ultimately to support our abilities and motivations to envision and make places of social flourishing that can respond to our socio-environmental crises.

The digital health and wellbeing movement has led to development of digital mindfulness applications that aim to help people to become mindful. In this paper we suggest a broad scheme for classifying and ordering apps intended to support mindfulness. This scheme consists of four levels of what we here term digital mindfulness. One crucial aspect of the fourth level is that artifacts at this level allow for what we term as presence-with and presence-in as opposed to presence-through, which occurs at the first three levels. We articulate our four levels along with specific design qualities through concrete examples of existing mindfulness apps and through research through design (RtD) work conducted with design fiction examples. We then use a working design case prototype to further illustrate the possibilities of presence-with and presence-in. We hope our four levels of digital mindfulness framework will be found useful by other researchers in discussing and planning the design of their own mindfulness apps and digital artifacts.

Student engagement is crucial for successful self-paced learning. Feeling isolated during self-paced learning with neither adequate supervision nor intervention by teachers may cause negative emotions such as anxiety. Such emotions may in turn significantly weaken students' motivation to engage in learning activities. In this paper, we develop a self-pacedlearning environment (FishBuddy) that aims to reduce anxiety and promote student engagement. We construct and implement a physiologically-state-aware performance-evaluation model for identifying potentially fruitful moments of intervention when students show frustration during learning activities using an Apple Watch application that measures heart rate and alerts the student to watch a visualization of his or her own physiological state. We have conducted an experiment with 20 first-year undergraduate students, randomly separated into an experimental group and a control group, who carry out online, self-paced English grammar exercises. The students in the experimental group used FishBuddy and those in the control group did not. The self-reports from both groups show that FishBuddy significantly reduced reported experiences of anxiety and isolation in the experiment. Further to this, students who used FishBuddy were engaged longer with the exercises. The average scores on the exercises between the two groups, however, were not significantly different.

This article proposes and describes a visitor-oriented perspective emphasizing the unique needs of visitors of digital environments in contrast to the user-oriented perspective that emphasizes the needs of users. To do so, the term accommodation is introduced in a technical sense and given a brief explanation. Results are also reported from 3 explorative studies of desktop virtual reality environments. In these studies, the visitor-oriented perspective was adopted and allowed for analyzing how participants perceived the environments as places rather than artifacts for use. In comparison to a web site, it was found that even a rudimentary virtual reality environment can have a positive impact on visitor regard for information content. Implementing teleports increased the efficiency of 1 test environment, but it was not found to have a positive effect on user attitudes to the environment. Many participants felt that the environments were sterile. Another common complaint was about the amount of walking required in the first environment. Five suggestions are given for building desktop virtual reality environments that are better received by visitors. In closing, the visitor-oriented perspective presented here is briefly discussed in relation to Winograd and Taber's (1997) writings on software inhabitants.

Many have tried to answer the question of what a digital library is and how such libraries should be built. But, in a sense the question of how to construct digital libraries as well defined entities is misguided from the beginning. There are many approaches to building digital libraries [7, 18, 4] and each approach must be understood from within a context. Some contexts such as information retrieval and digitizing of existing materials have received much attention [12, 22, 18, 17], while other contexts have been more or less ignored [19]. One such context is that of networking from a higher level of abstraction [8, 11]. Since traditional libraries have long since existed in elaborate and large-scale physical networks it is only natural that we should see such structures mirrored in the world of digital abstract networks. The Universal Simulator [10] application builds on the idea that research in digital libraries need not necessarily focus on micro level infrastructures, but that we may also find interesting possibilities on the macro level of digital library infrastructures. Moreover, at such a macro level we may find important new ways of collaborating and building digital libraries in educational settings.