Mainstream communication technology today enables us to connect with loved ones across long distances. However, even with the proliferation of easy-to-use technology, there are reports on increasing loneliness and isolation amongst people. The technologies that enable these interactions are not necessarily designed to support meaningful emotional communication for users in long-distance relationships (LDRs). Furthermore, there is a lack of participatory tools that are designed with the focus of supporting end-user involvement in the design of LDR communication systems. We developed the Flexi Card Game (FCG), a card-based generative design toolkit to support designers and non-designers within participatory structures that can help develop unconventional communication systems to support LDRs. The FCG was developed using an iterative design process, involving end-users, designers, and researchers across five workshops with 56 participants. The paper makes three main contributions: (1) presents FCG—the novel card-based design toolkit itself, (2) describes the process of developing an LDR framework into a participatory toolkit, and (3) offers lessons and insights that can help researchers who are developing participatory tools in similar contexts.

Simple and low bandwidth communication on computers has been found to promote intimacy between couples. In this work, we further explore this minimal communication in the form of wearables. This pictorial presents an in-the-wild concept study of low bandwidth ambient wearable displays as a communication channel between couples. The goal is to understand the contexts in which the technology might be used and provide benefit. Our findings show that simple communications through a wearable device could provide an additional channel for communication. The wearable form factors also creates the feeling of being always connected. We highlight the importance and influence of form factors, contexts, and activities towards user experience. We discuss the opportunities this study opens for the future design of wearable ambient displays.

Collocated interaction has received growing interest in both academic research and the design of information and communication technological applications. An emergent research topic within this area relates to technological enhancement of social interaction. Various envisioned systems aim beyond simply enabling interaction, to actively enhance—i.e., improve the quality or extent of—social interaction between collocated people. However, there is little understanding of the optimal design solutions and roles of technology considering this goal. This literature review outlines the landscape of design explorations in this emergent research topic. We contribute an in-depth study of 92 publications that present relevant solutions or prototypes, analyzing their focus areas, design objectives, and design and evaluation approaches. To contribute with a new theoretical perspective, we identify various roles of technology relevant for enhancement, representing three abstract categories: facilitating, inviting and encouraging. This review helps researchers to describe, analyze, and position relevant prior research and identify gaps in scientific knowledge.

Human Computer Interaction has developed great interest in the Maker Movement. Previous work has explored it from various perspectives, focusing either on its potentials or issues. As these are however only fragmented portrayals, this paper aims to take a broader perspective and interconnect some of the fragments. We conducted a qualitative study in the context of two Maker Faires to gain a better understanding of the complex dynamics that makers operate in. We captured the voices of different stakeholders and explored how their respective agendas relate to each other. The findings illustrate how the event is co-created at the nexus of different technological, social and economic interests while leaving space for diverse practices. The paper contributes a first focused analysis of Maker Faire, probes it as a site for research and discusses how holistic perspectives on the Maker Movement could create new research opportunities.

We present the design and prototype of the Linn Dress, a transforming dress that allows its wearer to dynamically reveal and conceal areas of skin, as they feel comfortable and appropriate for different contexts. Electrochromic displays are employed as the elements enabling the garment's dynamic transparency. The Linn Dress is designed for office workers with a lively lifestyle, who shift directly from the work environment to social evening events. The dress presents professional working attire, and when transformed to reveal exciting open cuts and patterns, a cocktail dress.

This paper explores the design space of wearable technology from the customisation point of view. We identify emerging customisation practices and customisable attributes from previous work in research and in a dataset of 129 commercial wearable devices. We distinguish between attributes on functional customisation, interaction techniques, location on the body, and appearance. While people have a variety of conventional clothing and accessories options to fulfil their personal preferences and lifestyle, this is a lot less for wearable devices. The commercial wearables still cluster around few use cases, especially fitness, and wrist-worn form factors.

The potential for mobile technology to support bespoke learning activities seamlessly across learning contexts has not been fully realized. We contribute insights gained from four months of field studies of place-based mobile learning in two different contexts: formal education with a primary school and informal, community-led learning with volunteers in a nearby park. For these studies we introduced ParkLearn: a platform for creating, sharing and engaging with place-based mobile learning activities through seamless learning experiences. The platform enables the creation of easily configurable learning activities that leverage the targeted learning environment and mobile devices' hardware to support situated learning. Learners' uploaded responses to activities can be viewed and shared via a website, supporting seamless follow-up classroom activities. By supporting creativity and independence for both learners and activity designers, ParkLearn promoted a sense of ownership, increased engagement in follow-up activities and supported the leveraging of physical and social communal learning resources.

Pokémon GO, a location-based mobile game with millions of users, offers an opportunity to study how mobile technology can encourage collocated social interaction between people. Despite being predominantly a single-player game, Pokémon GO has been discussed to induce a variety of social interactions between the players. We conducted a qualitative online survey to gain insight on collocated interactions and encounters that take place around the game, and to understand how they relate to the game design. Our analysis shows that the game design promotes encounters between players, the idle time during the game allows various forms of social interaction to take place, and further, the players gain various benefits from exchanging information with each other. Based on the findings, we present design implications for the design of mobile applications or games aiming to encourage collocated social interaction.

In collaboration between strangers, group formation and familiarization often take a lot of time. To facilitate this, icebreaking activities are commonly utilized, aiming at a positive and relaxing social atmosphere. To explore how interactive technology could serve as a tool in such social activity, we developed Who's Next, a multiplayer quiz-based mobile game intended to break the ice in a group of strangers. The design utilizes the information asymmetry between people, aiming to encourage joint activity between them. We conducted six evaluation sessions where four to six participants in each played the game together and were interviewed. Who's Next was found to be a promising support for icebreaking. It was considered to offer a comfortable way of sharing information about oneself and getting to know newly-met strangers. We conclude that interactive technology could successfully support the facilitator role in encouraging interaction and creating a relaxed atmosphere between strangers.

Many activities that have traditionally been performed with different dedicated physical artifacts are now done with personal mobile devices. Consequently, the privacy of mobile interfaces has hampered social observability and chances for serendipitous interactions. For example, reading an electronic newspaper with a mobile device does not allow the surrounding people to be similarly aware of the reader's activity as traditional newspapers. Social displays are additional displays on mobile devices providing the surrounding people with light-weight cues about the activities of the device user. We implemented a prototype that reveals the user's current active application and presents its name on an e-ink display on the backside of a mobile device. We conducted a ten-day field trial with 13 participants using the prototype. The results show that the prototype was able to increase awareness of users' mobile activities and occasionally triggered interactions with others, without significantly violating the sense of privacy.

Mobile phones have become common tools for photography. Despite the fact that photos are social artifacts, mobile phones afford the act of photo taking only as an individual activity. Photo taking that involves more than one photographer has been envisioned to create positive outcomes and experiences. We implemented this vision with mobile camera phones, exploring how this would influence photo taking practices and experiences. We conducted a user study where altogether 22 participants (11 pairs) were using a novel mobile photography method based on asymmetrical interaction abilities, comparing that with two traditional methods. We present the collaborative practices emerged in different photography methods and report user experience findings particularly with regard to enforced collaboration in mobile photo taking. The results highlight benefits and positive experiences in collaborative photo taking. We discuss lessons learned and point out design implications that come into play when designing for mobile collocated collaboration.

This paper presents the design and concept evaluation of Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application that uses gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions to encourage interaction between people who are regularly within a close proximity of each other. The application aims to break the current norm of matching and introducing people based on similar interests or commonalities. We conducted focus groups to evaluate the application concept. We report findings of the user study contributing to the understanding of the potential and challenges of gamified proximity-based social applications.

Encouraging social interaction between collocated strangers has become an increasingly popular topic in Computer Supported Collaborative Work research and interaction design. The research aims to foster more social interaction between collocated people to, e.g., produce positive new encounters and increase social awareness. To address these social goals, we developed Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application. Its design builds on the principles of gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions. This paper summarizes the novelties in the design and implementation of Next2You.

Activities that have traditionally been performed with tangible artifacts, e.g. reading the newspaper and browsing printed photos, have increasingly moved to mobile devices. This has made it harder for the surrounding people to become aware of the activities a person is performing with the device. As a result, the possibilities for serendipitous social interactions between the user and the collocated people have diminished. We introduce social displays, additional displays on mobile devices providing social cues about the activities of device user's activities for surrounding people. We conducted five focus groups with in total 23 participants, each discussing four scenarios and co-designing the presentation of cues on the display. The results suggest that the display has potential to break the private bubble of mobile device activities, as well as to provide tickets-to-talk to enhance social interaction, especially between acquaintances. We discuss social opportunities and challenges as well as possible design directions for social displays.

This paper presents a scenario-based user study of mobile application concepts that would encourage interaction between people within close proximity. The scenarios demonstrate three themes of digital tickets-to-talk: informing who and what are around, augmenting self-expression, and online interaction encouraging physical interaction. Our interview study explored the opportunities and challenges of such applications in developing into further face-to-face interactions between strangers. Tickets that are related to activities that convey a solid intention that would lead to practical collaboration, such as playing sports or studying together, have the best potential to advance to meaningful face-to-face interaction. Augmenting self-expression and online interaction encouraging physical interaction were found to have potential to create curiosity but seen less credible by our 42 interview participants to motivate face-to-face interaction between strangers. We conclude by discussing the potential of each theme of ticket-to-talk based on our findings as well as related literature.

Social Devices (SDs) are mobile devices that are proactive in social settings and aim to encourage social interaction between co-located people. We conducted a study of people's reactions to SDs with an audio-based interface on a semi-functional prototype. Based on a Wizard-of-Oz simulation, two SDs proactively started talking to each other and to the participants, with an aim to involve the participants to the conversation. We present the resulted social interactions and reactions as well as the participants' opinions about speech-based proactive SDs. Overall, SDs created a collaborative social situation and triggered a broad variety of social interactions, ranging from grounding to lengthy conversations. Meanwhile, the novelty of the technology and its rather dominant social role often shifted the participants' attention from each other to the devices, thus hindering social interaction. We conclude with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of audio-based interaction and the social proactivity of technology.