Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) is transforming numerous professions, not least various fields intimately relying on creativity, such as design. To explore GAI’s adoption and appropriation in design, an interview-based study probed 10 specialists in user experience and industrial design, with varying tenure and GAI experience, for their adoption/application of GAI tools, reasons for not using them, problems with ownership and agency, speculations about the future of creative work, and GAI tools’ roles in design sensemaking. Insight from reflexive thematic analysis revealed wide variation in attitudes toward GAI tools – from threat-oriented negative appraisals to identification of empowerment opportunities – which depended on the sense of agency and perceived control. The paper examines this finding in light of the Coping Model of User Adaptation and discusses designers’ metacognitive skills as possible underpinnings for their attitudes. Avenues for further research are identified accordingly.

Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviors (BFRBs), such as nail biting, impact a wide demographic, and can negatively affect physical, psychological, and social well-being. Although pharmacological and behavioral therapies are common treatments, many avoid seeking help, and not everyone responds fully to treatment. Recent advances in wearable sensing enable new digital solutions that can detect BFRB episodes and intervene to mitigate them. While BFRBs have been extensively studied in medical research, translating this knowledge into effective digital intervention solutions may not be straightforward, and the end user's perspective may be overlooked. We report a user study with 12 frequent nail biters, who shared their experiences about nail biting and expectations of intervention solutions in semi-structured qualitative interviews. We describe the progression of a nail biting episode from a nail biter's perspective and present a taxonomy of intervention strategies to mitigate nail biting. Our results inform the design of future digital BFRB intervention solutions.

With the latest advancements in Virtual Reality (VR), the possible use of VR devices in public and social contexts has increased. Since the use of VR typically requires wearing a Head-Mounted Display (HMD), the user is not able to see others - the spectators - present in the same context. This may lead to a decrease of social acceptability of VR by both the users and the spectators. We conducted a field experiment to explore what are the experiential factors of the users of VR (N=10) and spectators of VR use (N=30). We found experiential factors for the users to be adjustment of interaction, uninterruptable immersion, un-intrusive communication, freedom to switch between realities, sense of safety, physical privacy, shared experience, and sense of belonging. For the spectators, the main factors are shared experience, enticing curiosity, feeling normal, and sense of safety. We then run three sessions with user experience (UX) experts (N=9) to create a set of design recommendations for socially acceptable VR. The resulting ten recommendations provide a holistic view to designing acceptable experiences for VR in public spaces.

A variety of new kinds of consumer cameras that capture the full 360-degree surroundings in a single panorama photo or video has recently been introduced to the market. In addition to conventional viewing devices, such as smartphones and computers, the 360-degree photos and videos can also be viewed with a virtual reality headset for a more immersive experience. In this paper, we present a field study where 14 consumers used 360-degree cameras freely in their everyday lives for a period of four weeks. We describe the strategies that the participants applied to capture 360-degree content in different situations and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of using a 360-degree camera compared to conventional cameras. We identify four common practices of consumer 360-degree camera use: Panorama Capture, Experience Capture, Automatic Capture, and Document Capture. We also report on the participants' habits of viewing, sharing, editing, and managing consumer-captured 360-degree content.

Massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) technologies are key to addressing communication requirements of various emerging IoT applications. In this work, a multisite mMTC test network is designed and implemented in order to investigate the long-term communication quality and sensor data of LoRa and NB-IoT. This is essential for remote network maintenance operations, because it allows distinguishing communication quality defects from software/hardware failures. Moreover, it provides additional information about the communication link quality for network management. The test network is geographically scattered over a large area in Finland and experimented both in private and public networks. Measurements on LoRaWAN test networks revealed that higher SNRs and RSSIs are generally achieved for devices with lower spreading factors. Comparison of NB-IoT and LoRaWAN shows that NB-IoT has better communication quality performance. Overall, this paper provides first long-term multi-site and multi-technology mMTC measurements and corresponding performance analysis that are not available in the existing literature.

Immersive 360° video needs new ways of interaction. We compared three different interaction methods to find out which one of them is the most applicable for controlling 360° video playback. The compared methods were: remote control, pointing with head orientation, and hand gestures. A WebVR-based 360° video player was built for the experiment.

This article provides a survey and a general methodology for coexistence studies between digital terrestrial television (DTT) and mobile broadband (MBB) systems in the ultra high frequency (UHF) broadcasting band. The methodology includes characterization of relevant field measurement scenarios and gives a step-by-step guideline on how to obtain reliable field measurement results to be used in conjunction with link budget analyses, laboratory measurements, and simulations. A survey of potential European coexistence scenarios and regulatory status is given to determine feasible future use scenarios for the UHF television (TV) broadcasting band. The DTT reception system behavior and performance are also described as they greatly affect the amount of spectrum potentially available for MBB use and determine the relevant coexistence field measurement scenarios. Simulation methods used in determining broadcast protection criteria and in coexistence studies are briefly described to demonstrate how the information obtained from field measurements can be used to improve their accuracy. The presented field measurement guidelines can be applied to any DTT-MBB coexistence scenarios and to a wide range of spectrum sharing and cognitive radio system coexistence measurements.

As wearable devices become more popular, situations where there are multiple persons present with such devices will become commonplace. In these situations, wearable devices could support collaborative tasks and experiences between co-located persons through multi-user applications. We present an elicitation study that gathers from end users interaction methods for wearable devices for two common tasks in co-located interaction: group binding and cross-display object movement. We report a total of 154 methods collected from 30 participants. We categorize the methods based on the metaphor and modality of interaction, and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each category based on qualitative and quantitative feedback given by the participants.

As people possess increasing numbers of information devices, situations where several devices are combined and used together have become more common. We present a user study on people's current practices in combining multiple information devices in their everyday lives, ranging from pragmatic tasks to leisure activities. Based on diaries and interviews of 14 participants, we characterize the usage practices of the most common devices, including smartphones, computers, tablets, and home media centers. We analyze 123 real-life multi-device use cases and identify the main usage patterns, including Sequential Use, Resource Lending, Related Parallel Use, and Unrelated Parallel Use. We discuss the practical challenges of using several information devices together. Finally, we identify three levels of decisions that determine which devices are used in a particular situation, including acquiring, making available, and selecting the devices for use.

As people increasingly own multiple mobile and portable devices (such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops), situations where several devices are used together have become more common. A frequent problem in such situations is how to move virtual visual objects (such as content items or application windows) between device displays. We present a comparative evaluation of three methods for moving objects between personal mobile devices: Tray, Transfer Mode, and Device Touch. The participants' preferences of the methods in different real-life scenarios were found to strongly depend on the task and the context of use, making the design of a single optimal cross-display object movement method a challenging task. We identify several clusters of contextual factors that influenced the users' preferences. We also report more detailed differences in efficiency, novelty, learnability, physical device handling, and task completion strategies between the three methods included in the evaluation.

We present a touch-based method for binding mobile devices for collaborative interactions in a group of collocated users. The method is highly flexible, enabling a broad range of different group formation strategies. We report an evaluation of the method in medium-sized groups of six users. When forming a group, the participants primarily followed viral patterns where they opportunistically added other participants to the group without advance planning. The participants also suggested a number of more systematic patterns, which required the group to agree on a common strategy but then provided a clear procedure to follow. The flexibility of the method allowed the participants to adapt it to the changing needs of the situation and to recover from errors and technical problems. Overall, device binding in medium-sized groups was found to be a highly collaborative group activity and the binding methods should pay special attention to supporting groupwork and social interactions.

We present a comparative evaluation of two touch-based group-binding methods, a leader-driven method and a peer-based method, against a more conventional group-binding method based on scanning and passwords. The results indicate that the participants strongly preferred the touch-based methods in both pragmatic and hedonic qualities as well as in the overall attractiveness. While the leader-driven method allowed better control over the group and required only one participant to be able to form a group, the peer-based method helped to create a greater sense of community and scaled better for larger group sizes and distances. As the optimal group-binding method depends on the social situation and physical environment, the binding methods should be flexible, allowing the users to adapt them to different contexts of use. For determining the order of the devices, manual arrangement was preferred over defining the order by touching.

We explore shared collocated interactions with mobile phones and public displays in an indoor public place. We introduce MobiComics, an application that allows a group of collocated persons to flexibly create and edit comic strip panels using their mobile phones. The prototype supports ad hoc sharing of comic strip panels between people and onto two public displays by taking the spatial arrangement of people into account, measured with a radio tracking technology integrated in their mobile phones. MobiComics also includes game-like elements to foster social interaction between participants. Our evaluations show that people enjoyed creating panels collaboratively and sharing content using the proposed interaction techniques. The included game-like features positively influenced social interaction.

In this paper we explore shared collocated interactions with mobile phones. We introduce a phone-based application that allows a small group of collocated people to share photos using the metaphor of passing paper photos around. The prototype encourages people to share their devices and use them interchangeably while discussing photos face-to-face. The prototype supports ad-hoc photo sharing in different contexts by taking into account the spatial arrangement of users around a table, measured with sensors embedded in their mobile phones. Our evaluations show that people are willing to share and connect their mobile phones to engage in collaborative interactions. Participants were able to easily share their collections of photos using our proposed interaction techniques.

A mobile device provides an attractive tool for creating and sharing audio-visual stories. Earlier research has shown that the users enjoy creating digital stories with their mobile devices. However, designing editor interfaces that support creation of rich audio-visual presentations has been a major challenge due to the constrained input and output capabilities of mobile devices. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of the Mobile Multimedia Presentation Editor, an application that makes it possible to author sophisticated multimedia presentations that integrate several different media types on mobile devices. Based on a user study, we present design principles for multimedia presentation editors on mobile devices. We describe an application design that supports these principles and so demonstrate that editing of sophisticated multimedia presentations is feasible on mobile devices. We report evaluations which indicate that the editor application was easy to use and supported the creativity of the mobile users well.

DVB-H is a new broadcasting standard, which offers reliable high data rate reception for mobile handheld and battery-powered devices. A link layer, including Reed-Solomon error correction combined with cyclic redundancy check (CRC), is defined in the standard to work on top of the DVB-T physical layer. The DVB-H suggests to use an erasure decoding method based on CRC information. Yet, the decoding method is not strictly determined in the standard. This paper investigates the performance of four different Reed-Solomon erasure decoding schemes for DVB-H link layer forward error correction

The latest generation of mobile phones comes with a rich set of capabilities for presenting multimedia information and it is expected that the mobile phone will soon be one of the most widespread devices for consuming multimedia content. In this paper, we present an overview of the key opportunities and challenges in developing tools for authoring multimedia content for the mobile environment. First, we discuss on a general level the different needs of professionals, hobbyists, and ordinary phone users for mobile multimedia authoring tools. We then focus on easy-to-use mobile phone based authoring tools aimed for ordinary phone users. We present some of the most important applications of user-created mobile multimedia content. We conclude by looking at the typical characteristics of the current and near future mobile phones from the perspective of multimedia content authoring and discussing two common authoring approaches used.