Hybrid Environments – spaces where physical and digital elements are blended in-situ – have been growing and expanding over the past few decades. As these technologies become woven into our everyday lives, new challenges and opportunities emerge as they transform our experiences in our homes, workplaces, museums, and cities. Designing Hybrid Environments requires training in both the design of physical environments and interactive technologies. Cross-trained students in higher education need to be able to creatively respond and adapt to these emerging landscapes. Students must bridge fundamental knowledge in design, architecture, art, interactivity, and computation. This is a complex pedagogical practice. How are educators meeting this emergent need? The workshop’s primary goals are to (i) form a collective understanding of the current technological and pedagogical challenges to teaching the design and understanding of Hybrid Environments; (ii) bring together educators and practitioners interested in the future of Hybrid Environments, (iii) discuss creativity support tools as well as frameworks, methods, and approaches for teaching emerging technologies, (iv) form a multidisciplinary community to shape the future of pedagogical inquiry and implementation of Hybrid Environments.

When a person gets to a door and wants to get in, what do they do? They knock. In our system, the user's specific knock pattern authenticates their identity, and opens the door for them. The system empowers people's intuitive actions and responses to affect the world around them in a new way. We leverage IOT, and physical computing to make more technology feel like less. From there, the system of a knock based entrance creates affordances in social interaction for shared spaces wherein ownership fluidity and accessibility needs to be balanced with security

Whereas eco-feedback has been widely studied in HCI and environmental psychology, online manual control and automated control have been rarely studied with a focus on their long-term quantitative impact and usability. To address this, an intervention was tested with eighty office workers for twenty-seven weeks. Through the long-term field test, it was found that the addition of online controls in the feedback intervention led to more energy savings than feedback only and worked better for light and phone usage than computer and monitor usage. The addition of automated control led to the greatest savings but was less effective for efficient users than inefficient ones.

In this paper, we investigate the patterns of design choices made by classroom teachers for decorating their classroom walls, using cluster analysis to see which design decisions go together. Classroom visual design has been previously studied, but not in terms of the systematic patterns adopted by teachers in selecting what materials to place on classroom walls, or in terms of the actual semantic content of what is placed on walls. This is potentially important, as classroom walls are continuously seen by students, and form a continual off-task behavior option, available to students at all times. Using the k-means clustering algorithm, we find four types of visual classroom environments (one of them an outlier within our data set), representing teachers' strategies in classroom decoration. Our results indicate that the degree to which teachers place content-related decorations on the walls, is a feature of particular importance for distinguishing which approach teachers are using. Similarly, the type of school (e.g. whether private or charter) appeared to be another significant factor in determining teachers' design choices for classroom walls. The present findings begin the groundwork to better understand the impact of teacher decisions and choices in classroom design that lead to better outcomes in terms of engagement and learning, and finally towards developing classroom designs that are more effective and engaging for learners.

To accommodate frequent emergencies, interruptions, and delays, hospital staff continually make and coordinate changes to the surgery schedule. The technical and social aspects of coordination in surgical suites have been described by prior studies. This paper addresses an understudied aspect of coordination: the physical environment. Based on a field study of four surgical suites in two large academic centers, we show how the physical layout of hallways and rooms, and barriers and spaces around displays and key coordinators, support or fail to support the common information spaces used for coordination. We use the concept "information hotspots" to represent how physical places and their characteristics facilitate coordination. We developed design principles based on the concept of information hotspots that should guide architectural considerations for coordination in dynamic environments such as hospitals.

Large wall-sized displays are becoming prevalent. Although researchers have articulated qualitative benefits of group work on large displays, little work has been done to quantify the benefits for individual users. In this article we present four experiments comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. In these experiments, we held the visual angle constant by adjusting the viewing distance to each of the displays. Results from the first two experiments suggest that physically large displays, even when viewed at identical visual angles as smaller ones, help users perform better on mental rotation tasks. We show through the experiments how these results may be attributed, at least in part, to large displays immersing users within the problem space and biasing them into using more efficient cognitive strategies. In the latter two experiments, we extend these results, showing the presence of these effects with more complex tasks, such as 3D navigation and mental map formation and memory. Results further show that the effects of physical display size are independent of other factors that may induce immersion, such as interactivity and mental aids within the virtual environments. We conclude with a general discussion of the findings and possibilities for future work.

We present a study of the effects of instant messaging (IM) on individuals' management of work across multiple collaborative projects. Groups of four participants completed four web design tasks. Each participant worked on two tasks, each task with a different partner who was either co-located or remote, connected via IM. In one condition, each participant had one co-located and one remote partner. In a second condition, both partners were remote. We examined communication, division of labor, and task performance as a function of condition. The results indicated that nearly all participants divided their time unequally between projects, but less unequally in the remote/remote condition. In the co-located/remote condition, participants favored the task with the co-located partner. The results show that the effects of IM differ depending on people's multiple tasks are distributed across space. We propose a new IM interface that promotes awareness of multiple collaborators on multiple tasks.

Previous results have shown that users perform better on spatial orientation tasks involving static 2D scenes when working on physically large displays as compared to small ones. This was found to be true even when the displays presented the same images at equivalent visual angles. Further investigation has suggested that large displays may provide a greater sense of presence, which biases users into adopting more efficient strategies to perform tasks. In this work, we extend those findings, demonstrating that users are more effective at performing 3D virtual navigation tasks on large displays. We also show that even though interacting with the environment affects performance, effects induced by interactivity are independent of those induced by physical display size. Together, these findings allow us to derive guidelines for the design and presentation of interactive 3D environments on physically large displays.

Large wall-sized displays are becoming prevalent. Although researchers have articulated qualitative benefits of group work on large displays, little work has been done to quantify the benefits for individual users. We ran two studies comparing the performance of users working on a large projected wall display to that of users working on a standard desktop monitor. In these studies, we held the visual angle constant by adjusting the viewing distance to each of the displays. Results from the first study indicate that although there was no significant difference in performance on a reading comprehension task, users performed about 26% better on a spatial orientation task done on the large display. Results from the second study suggest that the large display affords a greater sense of presence, allowing users to treat the spatial task as an egocentric rather than an exocentric rotation. We discuss future work to extend our findings and formulate design principles for computer interfaces and physical workspaces.