How to motivate and support behaviour change through design is becoming of increasing interest to the CHI community. In this paper, we present our experiences of building systems that motivate people to engage in upper limb rehabilitation exercise after stroke. We report on participatory design work with four stroke survivors to develop a holistic understanding of their motivation and rehabilitation needs, and to construct and deploy engaging interactive systems that satisfy these. We reflect on the limits of motivational theories in trying to design for the lived experience of motivation and highlight lessons learnt around: helping people articulate what motivates them; balancing work, duty, fun; supporting motivation over time; and understanding the wider social context. From these we identify design guidelines that can inform a toolkit approach to support both scalability and personalisability.

Nonverbal communication is an essential part of face-to-face social interaction, conveying information about emotion and interpersonal relationships. The rigorous sensing capabilities of pervasive technologies and the subtle nature of ambient technologies make them ideal to support the production of nonverbal communication in social interactions. In this paper we present a study using an ambient technology that supports nonverbal communication, and specifically nonverbal behaviours associated with rapport. We show that an ambient display can influence a participant's nonverbal behaviour, and that participants are not aware of this change in their behaviour. We discuss these findings in terms of the design and ethical issues that it raises, and define an agenda for future work.

An Augmented Knights Castle (AKC) play set was adapted so that children with autism can configure programmable elements. This is compared with a non-configurable AKC. When the system is configurable, less solitary play and more cooperative play occurred. Configurability is a key factor in design for children with autism allowing greater individual control and more socially oriented behaviour. We suggest that tangibles provide a safety net for encouraging social interaction as they allow for a broad range of interaction styles.

This paper examines the process of customizing Particle sensors for use in a home energy monitoring project. Our developments affected sensor hardware, sensor software and data capture. The developed sensors have been deployed in two homes in the UK. We examine the issues in using 3rd party toolkits to undertake research and suggest design and process enhancements to better assist with the deployment of sensors in homes.

Ubiquitous and mobile technologies provide opportunities for designing novel learning experiences that move out of the classroom. Information can be presented and interacted with in a variety of ways while exploring a physical environment. A key issue this raises is when, where, what and how much? Our research is concerned with the design, delivery and interaction of digital information when learning about ecology outdoors. We present a framework of the different forms of digital augmentation and the different processes by which they can be accessed. Using the framework, we designed an outdoors learning experience, aimed at encouraging students to carry out contextualized scientific enquiry and to reflect on their interactions. Pairs of 11-12 year olds explored a woodland and were presented at certain times with different forms of digital augmentation. Our study showed that this kind of exploration promoted interpretation and reflection at a number of levels of abstraction.