Being in the world is to flow with the currents of life, of change and contingency. We perceive what is relevant to our situation and appropriately respond to attain a more desirable state. This basic phenomenon of coping plays out continuously at multiple scales of our activity and has been argued as the fundamental way in which we engage with the world. Coping skilfully is to be able to perceive and act in a nuanced manner, attuned to the situation and able to act smoothly and with minimal conscious effort. If coping underpins activity, what are the implications for interaction design, which involves the design of activity? This article explores this question, showing how coping provides a novel perspective on the core phenomena of interaction design. We suggest a framework for situating the concerns of coping in interaction design, consisting of four lenses: malleability, direct manipulability, meta manipulability and social manipulability. In our discussion we argue why coping is novel and relevant for interaction design, and how it expands upon existing perspectives on situated, resourceful action and challenges notion of rich action and coupling.

For over 50 years, hormone-based contraceptives have allowed women to control their fertility, thus reconfiguring society and how women relate to their body. On the horizon are long-life microchip-based implanted contraceptives that can be turned on and off, which may further the societal disruptions of "the pill". Framed as interactive technology, we speculate on the design space of controllable implanted contraceptives. We explored existing implanted contraceptives through a performance ethnography of their implantation. Inspiration from this process informed a speculative video of living with controllable implants and a guide for healthcare professionals. These materials, along with expert presentations, backgrounded a design workshop in which participants unpacked issues around controllable contraceptive implants. Participants created and roleplayed physical mock-ups of controllers, manifesting discussions around security, relationships and hormones. Drawing from the outcomes of the workshop, we produce a speculative design in the form of a film and physical mock-ups.

Practicing designers must usually relate to branding in some manner. A designed artifact must support the brand in a constructive way and help establish positive brand experiences, which in turn have strategic value for the brand's institution. While there is obvious application of visual branding knowledge to the visual form of interactive artifacts, interviews with expert practitioners reveal a lack of systematic means to craft an interaction aesthetic to support a brand. Our empirical study relates attributes of interactive experience to that of 'brand personality', a common way of quantifying how a brand should be perceived. We show that particular attributes of interactivity, such as whether an interaction has a continuous rather than discrete flow, are related to particular brand traits. Our empirical results establish a clear commercial significance for deeper, systematic ways of analyzing and critiquing interactive experiences.

In this paper we report on the design and implementation of an initial prototype to explore how to better situate in the home social media content individually generated by family members. We considered whether existing infrastructure and practices of social media might be leveraged to offer new kinds of shared family experiences. We found that families perceived the system to be "cosy" and intimate, especially in contrast to Facebook, and as a result 'shared to care'. While aspects of the design had a strong role to play in faciliating this perception, participants enacted their own boundaries of sharing and disclosure based on pre-existing practices and attitudes toward social technologies. The study demonstrated that there are productive design opportunities in home systems that can leverage content via a broad range of social media applications.

The focus of this paper is our recent real-world demonstration using an industrial robot certified for running in explosive atmospheres (ATEX). The demonstration is run amidst live and running hydrocarbon processes and involves autonomous valve manipulation and thermal inspection operations. The valve manipulation operation involves sensor-based movements which implies that the robot trajectories have not been programmed a priori (off-line). In particular, an approach will be presented to sense and avoid over-tightening/loosening of the valve. To the best of our knowledge, this prototype is the first system that performs sensor-based close-contact operations in a real operational environment.

One of the major challenges in the design of social technologies is the evaluation of their qualities of use and how they are appropriated over time. While the field of HCI abounds in short-term exploratory design and studies of use, relatively little attention has focused on the continuous development of prototypes longitudinally and studies of their emergent use. We ground the exploration and analysis of use in the everyday world, embracing contingency and open-ended use, through the use of a continuously-available exploratory prototype. Through examining use longitudinally, clearer insight can be gained of realistic, non-novelty usage and appropriation into everyday use.

In this paper we describe a use context for ubicomp technology seldom investigated: the industrial setting, and in particular, the oil and gas industry. We suggest that the field offers interesting challenges to the ubicomp field and briefly outline some design opportunities. In particular, we identify the need to ease flowing of activity across boundaries of space, physical/digital and varied systems. We also describe our grounded approach, starting with qualitative field studies and leading through to the design and implementation of novel prototypes. The contribution of this paper is a concrete description of this alternative use context and a sketching of potential ubicomp solutions to meet industrial needs.

Industrial robots, designed for performing operations quickly, repeatedly and accurately have a long heritage in the manufacturing industry, operating in relatively static environments and in large numbers. Trends in the oil and gas industry to improve safety and efficiency and reduce environmental impact suggest the use of industrial robotics. New developments in regions difficult or dangerous for humans to work in could be enabled with maintenance, inspection and repairs carried out by remotely-controlled industrial robots. This new application area highlights some difficulties with today's robots, as they do not adapt well to dynamic environments, do not offer rich human-robot interaction and are not simple for end-users to program. In addition, the oil and gas context presents a challenging work environment for robots as they are exposed to variable and often extreme weather and need to be safe for use alongside explosive hydrocarbons. As robots are introduced, issues of trust and accountability come to the fore as well as how they fit into organisational structures. If robots have too little autonomy, human operators will waste time attending to robots instead of attending to their work tasks. If robots are highly autonomous, situational awareness of plant activity is diminished. A balance needs to be struck to find a level of autonomy suitable for the task, the realistic capabilities of the automation, and the need to actively engage human operators in a constructive fashion. These issues also relate to what form the interface takes for remote or co-located robot control, as well as how information and activity is represented for remote operators. The contribution of this paper is a discussion of issues relating to human-robot interaction for future industrial robotics, in particular for the oil and gas industry

In this paper, we introduce a prototype system designed to support mobile group socializing that has been appropriated for everyday use by 150 users over 18 months. The system supports cross-channel communication, allowing users to participate in group conversations using text messaging, instant messaging, email and the web. It does this with the "console," a uniform text-based syntax that enables the prototype to be used over a variety of mediums.