Hackerspaces and the hacker movement are receiving increasing attention within the HCI research community, yet these sites also have the potential to exclude people of low socioeconomic status from participating. We present a case study of an urban Australian e-waste recycling social enterprise (Substation33) that engages volunteers and welfare recipients in the Work for The Dole program in technology disassembly, repair, and making activities. Bringing these people together in shared making practices has resulted in a high degree of diversity in the organisation’s structure, mission, activities, and workforce. We identify and discuss four key factors that establish a sense of coherence using Lave and Wenger’s ‘Communities of Practice’ lens: the interdependence of activities, characteristics of the space, social relationships through peer learning, and community rules and expectations. We contribute to the discussion on new configurations of personal making and industrial production, and advocate for extending conceptualisations of hackerspaces to be more inclusive of hybrid organisations that serve the needs of people from low socioeconomic communities.

This study explores how initial perceptions of initial trust in a provider of social support and person-centeredness in supportive messages affect outcomes in video-mediated social support interactions. A controlled study was conducted with 240 participants who were randomly assigned to a condition in a 3 (initial trust in the support provider: affective, cognitive, and neutral) x 2 (person-centeredness of the support message: high or low) experimental setup. Results show that the effects of person-centeredness in support messages are the same as reported elsewhere for Face-to-Face (FtF) or text-based computer-mediated scenarios: high person-centered messages led to higher perceptions of support quality than low person-centered messages regardless of perceptions of initial trust in the support provider. Results also show that participants perceived the support provider’s quality to be higher if personal information (affective trust) about the support provider was available over expertise information (cognitive trust). Ethnicity of participants also had a significant effect on perceptions of support provider’s quality. Caucasians reacted much more positively to the message with high person-centeredness and much more negatively to the message with low person-centeredness than other ethnic groups. Asians perceived support provider’s quality highly regardless of person-centeredness. Hispanics and African Americans fell somewhere in between. This study demonstrates important implications in message delivery for video-mediated social support.

Conflicts in Iraq and Syria have forced millions of minorities to flee their countries and seek refuge elsewhere. This paper investigates the factors that affect the social capital of newly arrived refugees in Australia and the role of information and communication technology in supporting the rebuilding of their social capital. We present the findings from 3 participatory design workshops involving 14 newly arrived refugees form persecuted minorities in Iraq and Syria. Our findings highlight three main factors that affect social capital for newcomer refugees: cultural adjustment, organisational support, and social activities and support. We discuss our approach that helped refugees voice their concerns and challenges and provide possible venues for design to support the rebuilding of social capital in a refugee context.

Virtual volunteering is a convenient and powerful way for Volunteer-Involving Organisations to leverage skilled volunteers with Internet access to help them build organisational capacity and access specialised skills. This paper identified a gap in the HCI literature in relation to formal, organisation-lead virtual volunteering and discusses findings from a recent study detailing the main motivations of virtual volunteers and how ICTs influenced their volunteering experience were discussed. Example design considerations and future research opportunities are provided.

This paper contributes to the discourse on HCI and political economy, further developing theoretical concepts of strategies and tactics by drawing on the original work of French scholar Michel de Certeau. Strategies and tactics are developed and used as a lens to reflect and understand decisions made throughout an IT design process oriented toward infrastructuring social collaboration among people who are struggling financially. We demonstrate this by presenting the case of Commonfare, an EU funded project, and we focus, in particular, on the relationships between specific research and pilot project consortium partners. We explore decisions and actions that take place over four months between two milestones of the project -- the first platform release, and a general assembly.

Using a mixture of physical gestures and one’s smartphone is a convenient way for people to engage and interact with large displays in public. Yet, one of the challenges of designing such interactions is to use techniques that people are comfortable using in public. This paper presents a study of people using four different cross-device interaction techniques in public, to identify how users, and observers, feel about the physical movements and gestures required to interact with a large display using their smartphones. By collecting feedback and observations from both users and observers about their reactions and attitudes toward using these techniques in a public setting we identified five key factors that influenced people’s willingness to take part in the interaction, with respect to both doing, and being observed: Familiarity, Social Acceptability, Purpose, Easiness and Playfulness. We argue that these observer attitudes are important to consider when designing for user interaction with large displays in public.

A mid-air gesture-based interface could provide a less cumbersome in-vehicle interface for a safer driving experience. Despite the recent developments in gesture-driven technologies facilitating the multitouch and mid-air gestures, interface safety requirements, as well as an evaluation of gesture characteristics and functions, need to be explored. This paper describes an optimization study on the previously developed GestDrive gesture vocabulary for in-vehicle secondary tasks. We investigate mid-air gestures and secondary tasks, their correlation, confusions, unintentional inputs and consequential safety risks. Building on a statistical analysis, the results provide an optimized taxonomy break-down for a user-centered gestural interface design which considers user preferences, requirements, performance, and safety issues.

Though modern tablet devices offer users high processing power in a compact form factor, interaction while holding them still presents problems, forcing the user to alternate the dominant hand between holding and touching the screen. In this paper, we explore how eye tracking can minimize this problem through GazeGrip---a prototype interactive system for a tablet that integrates eye tracking and back-of-device touch sensing. We propose a design space for potential interaction techniques that leverage the power of this combination, as well as prototype applications that instantiate it. Our preliminary results highlight as opportunities enabled by the system reduced fatigue while holding the device, minimal occlusion of the screen, and improved accuracy and precision in the interaction.

This paper proposes a novel input technique involving seamless switching between relative and absolute coordinate modes based on a “carbon copy” metaphor for trackpads. In the method, a small workspace (“carbon copy area”) that corresponds in a one-to-one manner to a trackpad surface is displayed on a computer screen. While working on this virtual carbon copy paper, a user can operate in absolute coordinates; outside the paper, relative coordinates are used to move it anywhere and resize it. Therefore, our technique allows for the appropriate use of relative and absolute coordinate modes with arbitrary timing. This paper discusses the design of the technique, implementation of prototype applications, and a user study in which the technique received positive feedback and was shown to achieve a significantly higher input speed than that of a conventional pointing method.

User interaction with mobile devices can be negatively affected by contextual factors, known as situationally-induced impairments. In this paper, we provide a systematic overview of established situational impairments and their impact on interaction with mobile devices, as well as existing methods for their detection and design guidelines to overcome them. We also propose a research roadmap for this topic where we argue that more experiments are required regarding the less investigated situational impairments. Furthermore, we argue that successful detection of the presence of a specific situational impairment is paramount before solutions can be proposed to adapt mobile interfaces to accommodate potential situational impairments.

Privacy nudges are a “soft-paternalistic” method to nudge (instead of force) users to make more informed privacy decisions. While previous work has shown that privacy nudges are effective in encouraging users to adjust their privacy settings, current privacy nudges are considered to be annoying. Previous research found that modalities influence the effectiveness of responses to system messages. Hence, with the aim of improving the usability of privacy nudges, we conducted both a lab and a 3-day field study to empirically investigate how users perceive receiving privacy nudges using different modalities (combinations of visual, vibration, audio and speech). Our results suggest that app designers should implement privacy nudges which cede the decision of their delivery time to the users themselves. Most importantly, our findings reveal that to minimize annoyance, intrusiveness and interruption, while still being read, low priority notifications should not be delivered using salient modalities (i.e., audio or speech).

Many user interfaces on the Web are confusing for users to operate or make users more prone to mistakes, and we call such a user interface a "BADUI" (BAD User Interface). To solve these problems, we proposed WePatch, a system enables users to improve BADUIs on the Web by attaching improvement functions virtually. We implemented a prototype WePatch system as a browser extension that had functions for correcting inputted text automatically, and adding annotations and so on. Also, we experimentally compared the usability of BADUIs before and after being qualitatively improved by WePatch. The results revealed that WePatch considerably improved the usability of BADUIs.

Long lasting collaboration between industry and academia, rather than brief encounters, has been a topic in the HCI community for a long time. While benefits of any collaboration seem at first sight obvious, perceptions of each other’s skills, criteria for success, and handling of processes, timelines, and resolution of final outcomes pose considerable barriers to establish collaboration on a wider scale. Differing expectations and everyday work environments lead to prejudices and misunderstandings of motivations. The aim of this panel, consisting of representatives from academia and industry – all highly experienced in collaboration –, is to clarify some of the perceived barriers and identify opportunities for collaboration. Panellists are asked to tell some tales from previous projects and to come up with their wish list for a way forward to scale up collaborations. In particular, putting the users and their needs truly centre stage as a strategy for accomplishing the common goal of creating products and services that will be adopted instead of focusing on the differences is encouraged to be explored in the discussion to bring both sides together

We report a study to design and evaluate an app to support pregnancy information provided to women through an Australian health service. As part of a larger project to provide prenatal resources for culturally and linguistically diverse groups, this study focused on the design and reception of an app with the local Vietnamese community and health professionals of a particular hospital. Our study had three stages: an initial design workshop with the hospital; prototype design and development; prototype-based interviews with health professionals and focus groups with Vietnamese women. We explore how an app of this sort must be designed for a range of different use scenarios, considering its use by consumers with a multiplicity of differing viewpoints about its nature and purpose in relation to pregnancy care.

Positive Psychology suggests that every one of us has the potential to increase our psychological wellbeing, while Positive Computing endeavours to develop technologies to support wellbeing and human potential. One such technology, Computerised Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CCBT), has been found to be effective in increasing wellbeing for individuals with diagnosed mental health conditions. However, its ability to improve wellbeing in people without pre-existing mental health conditions is less well understood. To explore use in this population, an 8-week long user trial of a CCBT programme was conducted. Results provided insight into CCBT’s ability to; increase subjective wellbeing; increase empathy for individuals who do experience mental health conditions; enhance self-reflection; increase positive behaviour change; and increase motivation to action. In lieu of perpetually creating new health technologies, we suggest a design approach which explores the extension and repurposing of existing evidence-based technologies to support and enhance the wellbeing of previously unintended populations. We found CCBT to be a tool which could contribute to the wellbeing of wider society from a preventative, proactive and positive perspective. 

Mobile health (mHealth) apps have significantly increased in use and popularity in recent years. However, the initial experience of users with these apps is poorly understood. MindMax is an mHealth wellbeing app, designed and championed by the Australian Football League Players Association (AFLPA), which aims to harness the high levels of engagement with video games and widespread interest in sports to connect with users. Our qualitative research uses MindMax as a case study to understand the initial experiences of seven users. Our findings suggest that mHealth apps like MindMax can engage people in wellbeing training and goal setting; and video games and connections with sports stars and fellow fans can draw people back to the app to foster engagement and support wellbeing goals.

Cybersickness is a challenge for the implementation and enjoyment of virtual reality. There are many similarities in symptoms between cybersickness and migraine, therefore migraine research may help us better understand cybersickness. This paper investigates if many common migraine triggers affect cybersickness in virtual reality, by reviewing existing literature and research. Out of 22 identified common migraine triggers, 11 were found to increase cybersickness, 1 was found to have no effect and 6 had only limited research and the effects could not be determined. The other 4 triggers were found to be not relevant to a virtual reality situation. Based on these results, future research is suggested to determine the effects of these triggers as they may have a currently unknown negative affect on cybersickness.

We present the design of MyFootCare, a mobile app to support people with diabetic foot ulcers in their self-care. Self-care is a critical component of care for people with a diabetic foot ulcer as most of their ulcer care is provided away from the clinic. To promote better self-care, we designed a mobile application ‘MyFootCare’ that harnesses visual analytics and self-report to provide feedback about the healing process. MyFootCare encourages people to take a photo of their ulcer with their mobile phone each time they change their wound dressing. Based on computer vision techniques, users receive graphical feedback on changes in ulcer size over time to objectively track the healing progress. Additionally, MyFootCare seeks to foster self-care through personal goals, diaries, and reminders to enact care. Feedback from three people with chronic ulcers shows that the app builds on existing practices of taking wound photos and that it is seen as useful to track progress and to facilitate dialogue with clinicians. More work is underway to evaluate the use of MyFootCare in a deeper field study.

Wearable technologies, including smartwatches, clips and other sensors are enabling a new wave of self-monitoring, where users can track various aspects of their lives and the environment. New opportunities for self-managing health are becoming a reality – including sun exposure, where too much can cause sunburn/cancer but too little can lead to vitamin D deficiency. Current campaigns successfully promote the awareness of ultra violet (UV) exposure at a public level, but lacks meaningful lifestyle change. We use a commercial wearable UV/light sensor, visualizations, notification messages and educational content to inform a persuasive mobile application (app) to encourage self-management of sun exposure. We report on a preliminary study with three participants investigating usability, user experience and perceived value of the technology solution. Participants indicated that the app was easy to use, and showed promise in helping them understand personal sun exposure habits and in considering lifestyle changes.

The aim of this research is to create a simple wearable technology for people engaged in upper limb rehabilitation to track how much they move their arm as well as the activities that the arm is engaged in. This paper describes the design of the ‘ArmBeta’ prototype, which is based on the Microsoft Band 2 device and a mobile app. A lab-based trial study of ArmBeta with four healthy adults showed the accuracy for recognising reach-and-retrieve tasks was 78%, but the accuracy for other tasks (opening doors, eating, stirring a pot) was below 50%. A consecutive two-hour trial in daily life showed that the information generated was easy to understand but that the accuracy and accessibility need to be improved. We discuss the trade-offs between accessibility, accuracy, and the significance of information generated to track arm movement. The paper closes with considerations for future work to refine the system and to engage with patients and clinicians involved in rehabilitation.

In this paper we present a reflexive account of the development of two separate Research-through-Design studies. We draw from the experience of designing and creating two separate sets of design research artefacts that fit within a broader study into everyday domestic life. The paper’s contribution is structured around three elements relating to the development of design research artefacts and the: 1) Participants; 2) Researchers; 3) Study. It further aims to emphasise the need for a range of documentation on the diverse approaches researchers take within their design processes.

Media designers and interactive artists continue to expand the boundaries of experience design (XD) as they engage with increasingly diverse environments. Teaching, designing and understanding experience design and its participatory culture are likewise no longer grounded in traditional ideas such as software engineering, or visual design. Expanding on the theory of ‘ambiguity as a resource for design’ and ‘open vs. closed text’, we propose designers consider the interpretative role of an experiencer as part of an iterative design process. Working with a three-stage grounded theory process, we analyse two case studies, The Remediation of Nosferatu and The Interactive Hammock. With this research, we contribute design recommendations and evidence to support the importance of understanding and awareness of ambiguous vs. prescribed qualities.

Basic human needs are a valuable source for creating meaningful products. Hence, designing for a positive User Experience requires an extensive understanding of those. Instead of just analysing abstract data, designers should also gather implicit information based on their own perception to gain holistic insights on the users’ emotional perspectives. Inevitably there exists an influence of the designers’ individual perspective on the accumulated insights during user research activities. However, if the designers are aware of their own and multiple other perspectives on needs, there is a good chance that they value relevant observations in user research. The NEEDS PROFILE (NP) is an approach to sensitise for diverse human needs and their characteristics. As designers often tend to find basic needs abstract, the NP enables them to explore basic needs as vivid personifications and encourages them to engage in a creative and playful manner first. Then these insights are confronted in guided discussions in order to enable sustainable learning. Evaluation results are positive, but further investigation needs to be done on long-term effects.

We present a case study of persona development, foregrounding gender as a primary axis of design. In a participatory design process, we developed personas to represent users of a learning and networking platform for female IT professionals. These personas are a means of ensuring that the female perspective is represented in the design process. We consider the phases of persona development in the light of existing concepts to confront the gendered status quo. We then show how these considerations regarding gender were implemented in our project IT&me.

Empathy with users is seen as crucial in the design process. Empathising with users is not trivial, especially if they are different from the design team, e.g. have a different gender or age. Additionally, people differ in the extent to which they empathise and have emotional responses towards others. In an empirical study, we explored the effect of different cognitive styles on the perception of personas. Our results indicate that an empathising cognitive style might alleviate an egocentric approach to design and that both empathising and systemising cognitive styles can be helpful in understanding personas. We suggest further research into the role of cognitive styles regarding the use and composition of personas.

There is an increasing interest in social robotics. However, there is a paucity of methods for understanding successful human-robot interactions and identifying the factors that influence success. This paper describes the planning and running of a pilot study conducted to inform the research design for an empirical study on helpfulness in children. The research question was whether and how children would help an inanimate robot recipient as they are known to help a human being. The multidisciplinary research team discussed before the pilot study and after each pilot session whether the research design would enable them to investigate this research question from a psychological point of view while taking into account the capabilities of the robot. The planning process shows that when conducting a study to systematically investigate the effect of robots on human beings many detailed considerations need to take place. As well, there is often not enough detail in studies published to set up a sufficiently detailed research design. This research is relevant for Human-Computer Interaction researchers as well as psychologists in order to better understand the effects of introducing robots into people’s lives, and the implications when technology takes on a human role.

Collective Interaction (CI) is an interaction model coined to explore new opportunities for interactive technology in support close collaboration amongst co-located people. This paper reports on a Research through Design (RtD) based visual analysis of seven CI research prototypes. The analysis includes an annotated portfolio, annotated mappings and redesign sketches. Through comparisons the visual analyses, identifies qualities, similarities and differences of CI, and connect these to properties of the design. Through its capacity to point out and articulate CI qualities, the visual analysis contributes to the repertoire of RtD approaches, by framing discussions relevant for understanding the characteristics of design prototypes extending beyond the written language.

Consumer demand for food that satisfies specific needs rather than generic mass produced food is growing. In response, the food industry is actively investigating techniques for efficient and comprehensive food customisation. Digital approaches to food customisation are starting to emerge, however, the majority is currently limited to the ingredient level thus excluding consumption drivers such as people’s practices and values around food. Using the approach of cultural probes, we identified four distinct narratives around bread consumption: the healthy bread, the fresh bread, the ethical bread, and the exceptional bread. These themes encapsulate drivers of bread consumption, which we argue can inform the design of digital food innovation platforms.

After its first prominent application as part of the digital currency Bitcoin, blockchain technology is gaining in popularity. It comprises a chain of blocks (the ledger) that provides a secure, immutable and auditable list of ordered records. Using both cryptography and a distributed database, once a block is recorded, it can no longer be changed. In Bitcoin’s case, the ledger contains the history of all currency transactions. This paper offers a critical overview of the blockchain technology for an interaction design audience, in three parts: (1) The principles making blockchain technology possible are briefly explained using examples. (2) Specific cases such as food provenance and supply chain tracing, are used to illustrate both the wide array of possible applications and the profound implications of blockchain technology. (3) Opportunities and challenges for HCI and interaction design are discussed in the form of a nascent research agenda.

Increasingly people use mobile phones many times daily. This makes the phone’s lockscreen almost ambient, part of everyday life. This work explores how to use that valuable ambience of the lock-screen to help people maintain awareness of, and to track an important goal, such as improving nutrition. We describe the design of FIT, a lockscreen app for ultra-lite logging of vegetable serves consumed each day. Our 4-week field study of FIT, with 19 young adults indicates it is quick and easy to use. The 973 log events took an average of 1.03 seconds, compared with 0.72 seconds for the 25,530 unlocks. The study demonstrated most people found FIT to be an ambient reminder to eat vegetables and track intake. Our contributions are the definition of lock-screen ambience and the design and evaluation of FIT, that harnesses ambience to raise awareness of and support ultra-lite logging of an important nutrition goal.

Search is near-ubiquitous in human society, being used for entertainment, health, financial and business information seeking. Traditional methods of search evaluation have assumed that searchers move forward through search results in a linear manner; early eye tracking studies have suggested the same. Recent research, though, including eye-tracking data, has demonstrated a number of counter-cases, particularly for search in complex conditions. These examples highlight how little we understand where humans look or what they are doing when examining search results: in this paper we survey the literature to refine this research question, and suggest avenues for developing a model of behaviour.

Relevance is the strength of the relationship between a user’s perceived information need and an information object. Systems designed to help users identify relevant information can often rely on high quality labelled datasets. However, the subjective and personal nature of relevance means that establishing ground truth labels is difficult. In this work, we conduct a user study on text documents to crowdsource relevance assessments against four topics. Workers’ self-reported measures and task completion speed are used to calculate a range of ground truth measures against which classification performance can be assessed. Our results indicate that average subjective relevance and confidence-weighted measures are on par with the annotations from an expert panel. Further work is planned to expand these findings.

Driving fatigue becomes the main factor causing vehicular accidents. Detecting driving fatigue using physiological sensors is considered an effective method. In this paper, we develop a driving fatigue detection system called “SYMAGIC smart ring”, which can be applied in the real industries. It includes three parts: a hardware device, a phone application and a connection to the cloud server. The whole system is economical and robust, which meets the requirements of the transportation industries.

Heart failure self-management can be complex and challenging. We are collaborating with healthcare professionals, patients and families to co-design a consumer mHealth application in support of heart failure self-management. Four patient-modelled personas, developed through ethnographic interviews, were used in co-design workshop activities to represent the patient experience and associated health challenges. We explain how persona use benefited patients, the design team and the project lead in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and anonymity, in our commitment to developing a mHealth application which meets the needs of our patients and is clinically relevant.

Libraries are facing huge challenges today and have to modernize and integrate digital solutions and new offerings (e.g. provide study spaces). As part of a major refurbishment of its two largest libraries, Monash University Library is improving and enhancing the navigation and wayfinding for students, staff and visitors. Oakton is being engaged to design and implement a kiosk solution that will allow for wayfinding as well as digital signage

Over the last ten years there has been a development of the concept of living labs as quadruple helix innovation platforms, many with strong emphasis on ICT solutions in a variety of settings. In Europe, there has been some exploration of living labs in conjunction with HCI/UX approaches. In Australia, living labs are at an early stage of development. This paper reviews the state of development and intersection of living labs and HCI/UX approaches and the opportunities for living labs for practitioners in the Australian context

This paper identifies citizens’ experience in an ideation session for government online services. A purposeful sampling is applied to find subjects willing to participate on a particular date and able to explain their experiences in this domain in a reflective manner. This platform provides potential creative solutions to the problems. A sprint design method is adopted in order to produce an impactful outcome to the participatory approach.

Design Thinking as one of the most popular, human-centred design approaches, is frequently presented as a solution to many of the problems that large organisations face when executing radical innovation projects. Yet, how to adequately implement it in large organisations that typically struggle with flexibly changing their innovation approaches, is not understood well enough yet. In this article, insights from a longitudinal study are presented highlighting difficulties with the application and implementation of Design Thinking by a novice multidisciplinary team in a large organisation in the FMCG industry.

Combining exercises with game elements (exergaming) is a promising approach to increase physical activity of users not intrinsically motivated to exercise. Multiplayer games are particularly promising, since they add a social (competitive or collaborative) component. However, exercising together can become frustrating if users have vastly different abilities. In this paper, we review existing approaches for balancing differing physical abilities of players in competitive exergames, and based on this, we propose a novel exertion-based balancing formula. In contrast to previous work, we evaluate exertion-based balancing formulas with a moderately complex gameplay and show that it results in closer competitive gameplay and a more enjoyable game experience. The proposed formula can be applied to a wide variety of exergames and has the potential to increase compliance and long-term use of exergames.

Mobile technologies have become an important part of run training, however, existing technologies focus on performance metrics (e.g., distance and pace), which make it difficult for runners to improve their running technique. In this paper, we present Strive, a wearable running technology that aims to assist runners in achieving rhythmic breathing; a running technique that potentially leads to improved results and lower injury risk. Strive continuously collects physiological data and uses haptic feedback to provide real time assistance during runs. As communicating technique-related information in the dynamic and complex context of a run is challenging, we present two studies. The first study investigates how runners adapt to two different vibration patterns; and the second study explores the temporality of the assistance through three different approaches: Continuous, periodical, and self-serviced. Based on these studies, we discuss and provide insights on interacting with technologies during runs.

Exergames, i.e. games that combine play with physical activity, rarely recognize the whole family as a user group in its own right. We organized a design workshop to explore new direction for those types of exergames. We argue that recognizing the whole family as a target group implicitly improves game enjoyment due to its friendly social context, provides an excellent opportunity to improve social relatedness experiences through family bonding and intergenerational interactions, and contributes to individuals’ wellbeing in terms of both physical thriving and social relatedness. Three design concepts were proposed using cooperative and/or competitive game modes. We propose considering family members with limited gaming experience as audience players and recognising their autonomy in the exergame design. We believe that through an enhanced understanding of family exergames, designers and developers can build new experiences that accommodate various capabilities and social dynamics of the family.

Though video games have become increasingly popular among female players, competitive game genres are still dominated by male players. Research has explored the factors influencing male and female participation in competitive games, but little has focused on analysing gendered character choice and playing style preferences based on large in-game dataset. This research utilizes a mix-methods approach to examine gender differences in one of the most popular multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, League of Legends (LoL). The results show that gender stereotypes affect the in-game character design, players’ perception of abilities, and social convention in LoL, which further caused the gender differences of in-game character choice and playing style. We discuss design implications to make LoL more inclusive to female players.

Self-Determination Theory (SDT) is often used to measure aspects of the player experience (PX) in videogame research. In aggregate, work in this vein is concerned with measuring basic need satisfaction during play. These needs are competence, autonomy and relatedness. While measures of competence and autonomy are relatively straightforward, there are still questions about how we measure the connectedness that players achieve in and through videogame play. Relatedness is most often studied in dyadic relationships, despite broader definitional origins. The present work therefore approaches the conceptual application of relatedness need satisfaction to videogame play, with a view towards facilitating its empirical study. As a result, this research proposes avenues from which even single-player videogames can support relatedness needs — arising from parasocial relationships, culture, and the videogame itself.

While game experience research is gaining more interest, understanding player experience and emotions that are invoked during a play session is not a completely resolved topic. There has been some research into using electroencephalogram (EEG) for player experience evaluation since questionnaires can only provide limited information. However, the complexity of using EEG as an evaluation tool has been an issue. In this study, we explored the potential of a consumer-grade EEG device in player experience evaluation compared to the questionnaire approach. Results show that the device provides somewhat matching data with the questionnaire and potentially further information about the momentary player experience.

Research in the Wild (RITW) typically involves the deployment of technology in a setting, using the methodology of ‘probing’ contexts, to change behaviour or enhance community practice. This way of conducting HCI research is becoming an increasingly popular approach. To help in this endeavour, Rogers and Marshall [28] present an overarching framework that considers the different aspects involved. As part of the framework, they stress the importance of the design of the technology to be deployed. However, they do not detail how researchers should go about this. Here, we propose how to fill this gap: by providing a more explicit and principled rationale as part of RITW, presenting a method for accomplishing this, and reporting a case study about community gardening that uses a provocative prototype.

As technology increasingly pervades the daily life of teachers and students, finding sustainable ways to successfully integrate innovative technologies in classrooms remains a challenge. This paper reports on our experiences designing and running workshops with (and for) teachers. Collectively, the aims of the workshops were geared ultimately at encouraging teachers to work with technologies in more ‘designerly’ ways in the classroom, i.e. looking at technology as a working material, rather than as an off-the-shelf tool for certain activities, educational content or as an isolated part of the curriculum. We present a case study of one of the workshops, the Community Garden, designed in the format of a hackathon. We report on how teachers adopted the workshop concept, appropriated the technologies and, more interestingly, how six months later they appropriated the design process as a pedagogy to engage students in their learning.

Many projects seek to engage urban dwellers to learn about local birds. However, many of these projects require some background knowledge that can be difficult to obtain independently. Our project explores how to make engaging with and learning about local birds easier. To do this, we designed and developed BirdSound, a device that engages people to record nature sounds and learn to identify bird species by sight and sound. We conducted contextual interviews with six people living in an urban environment, who were curious but not experienced in birdwatching. These interviews aided in attaining present frame of knowledge held by each participant. Then, we explored how these participants interacted with BirdSound in their homes. BirdSound sparked participants to recount experiences with the device, social interactions and knowledge of birds. BirdSound use required intense focus, and we can envisage more ambient approaches that also support more social forms of learning

Externally observing of animal behaviour is an essential method for understanding and improving captive animal welfare, but is limited by observer subjectivity and high-labour costs, and is not embedded in day-to-day care. In this paper, we present a solution via a system that utilizes a single thermal camera to automatically locate giraffes within their enclosure, matching human estimation accuracy. We present an account of the development of this system, our approach, and an evaluation through focus-group interviews with zoo-keepers which provide insight into the most appropriate visualisation methods, and the future opportunities for automatic tracking technologies to support husbandry practices, zoo visitor experiences, and conservation education.

Encouraging sustainable living by raising awareness of resource consumption has long been a topic within HCI. However, getting people to change behavior when it comes to energy consumption is difficult. This is one of the major challenges ahead for future energy systems, in particular if resources are renewable and plentiful. We developed the ClockCast prototypes (web and clock forecast) to explore demand response and the flexibility potential of everyday practices. We wanted to reframe the conversation on demand response: from highlighting when not to use energy to highlighting when to use it. The ClockCast prototypes display the best times to use electricity, and they were complemented by proactive and positive suggestions. We conducted a pilot study with five different households to uncover the socio-technical challenges around shifting consumption and the participants’ experiences with the prototypes. While the participants increased their awareness of the environmental implications of their actions, shifted some electricity use, and found the forecasts useful, some participants also reported newfound guilt when they did not follow the forecasts.

This paper will discuss the impacts Deaf culture and the traits of individual Deafness have on the conduct of co-design with Deaf children. A series of design sessions were undertaken with a design team composed of young Deaf children, the first author as an adult designer, members of an Early Childhood Development Program’s staff, and the parents of the young Deaf children. From the interactions of the design team, lessons about the impact of Deaf culture and individual Deafness have been identified. Designers wishing to work with young Deaf children must consider the impacts Deafness and Deaf culture will have on their design activities if they wish to maximise Deaf children’s involvement in and contribution to those design activities.

The potential to provide users with a positive experience is enhanced when design addresses users’ needs and desires. This can be achieved when users are included in the design process. Inclusion is even more essential when users have a disability. This paper describes an IDEA Framework that explores inclusive design partnerships where deaf or hard of hearing Australian children are facilitated by other individuals in design processes.

This paper presents a study in which a mobile visual calendar application, ‘MyCalendar’ was used to try to support communication and interaction of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This paper reports findings on how the App was used in school classrooms. MyCalendar was evaluated with 11 children in an Australian Autism Special Education Unit over six months and was found to stimulate excitement with video and photo sharing as well as interaction in specific classroom activities. Our previous work examined interactions between home and school, and interactions at home supported by MyCalendar. This analysis focuses entirely on interactions at school by examining data from classroom activities. Three findings revealed: (1) the MyCalendar application supports learning activities in the classroom and facilitates the inclusion of children with ASD who have limited verbal skills. The sharing of each child's personal experience enabled the teachers and children to form a common basis for communication and adding vocabulary, as well as allowing the teacher to model language so as to identify children's emotions; (2) MyCalendar allowed children with limited verbal skills to better communicate their real interests through photos and videos. This enabled the teacher to better identify each child’s interest and thereby scaffold more relevant and meaningful learning; (3) Understanding interests enabled teachers to successfully motivate children to interact more in formal learning activities. While it was initially expected the activities would better support communication between teacher and children, the larger and unanticipated effect has been to create opportunities for structuring and scaffolding communication and social interaction in the classroom.

Current and emerging participatory design practices are providing opportunities for people with intellectual disability to have a say in how technology can best support them and their individual needs. In this paper we present lessons learnt from a co-design exercise aimed at designing a mobile application to support people with intellectual disability when using public transports. We investigate more specifically four elements proposed in the literature in order to deepen the engagement of participants: a digital prototype, a non-finito feature, inclusion of a proxy, and a co-development opportunity. Our observations with 3 users with intellectual disability engaging in an hour long co-design workshop with a carer confirm the benefits of digital prototypes and non-finito features in this context, contribute a better understanding of the role of proxies, and suggest a longer engagement to potentially take advantage of co-development.

Passwords still represent an annoying burden for millions of Internet users. Helping people create memorable and secure credentials is therefore an important goal for web-service providers to satisfy user needs. Due to the good memorability of pictures, emojis may be a suitable tool to create memorable and secure passwords. These small pictograms have seen an enormous rise in recent years, but their usage in regular passwords has not been explored for the Web. In a two-part user study with 40 participants we investigated if and how emojis are suitable in this context. We asked users to create passwords that contained both regular alphanumeric characters and emojis. The study shows that users’ primary selection strategy was to create meaningful relationships between the emoji and the rest of the password. We also found that platform dependent renderings of emojis do not necessarily reduce usability, if the object represented by the emoji is distinctive enough. As websites are already starting to allow emojis in passwords, it is important to evaluate this step carefully. Our results can inform this decision and provide pointers to the usability implications.

Human-Computer Interfaces play a key role in the design of Information System, as they link the system with its endusers, allowing information exchange and improving communication. Nowadays, applications increasingly become various and complex, they aim at multiple, heterogeneous and dynamic contexts of use examined according three facets: the end-users of the interactive system, the platform with which users have to perform their interactive tasks and the physical environment where they are interacting Nevertheless, users no longer wish to adapt themselves to this heterogeneity of the interaction situations; they yet want their systems to be adapted. Thus, with regard to the requirements to which the multiplicity of technologies is added, providing User Interfaces (UIs) with adaptation capabilities is becoming more and more an important issue. We address these issues by proposing a Model-Driven Engineering approach for semi-automatic generation of context-dependent UIs based on a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) as an adaptation engine. Our approach is supported by a conceptual framework and a graphical tool for modeling context situations, editing adaptation rules and launching the adaptation process.

Users often fail to create strong passwords. Besides lack of motivation, another possible explanation are misconceptions about the factors that contribute to password strength. Such misconceptions play an important role for the design of feedback systems during password selection. In this paper, we present an online game that helps quantifying the perception of password strength. Players score points by rating the strength of passwords accurately under time pressure. We analyzed the usage logs from the first four months after rollout. We found that users underestimate passphrases by 1.4 points on a 5-point strength scale, while their other ratings are fairly consistent with our estimates. Although we used a different methodology, we were able to corroborate related findings and narrow down the features that users think contribute to password strength. We highlight how the data collected through PASDJO can help designing better password feedback and boost user experience during account creation.

Situated technologies have become a common feature in the 21st century city, ranging from small-scale temporary interventions to permanent embedded large-scale media displays. At the same time, the increasing pervasiveness of social media and web platforms has fostered a culture of digital self-representation in the form of ‘selfies’ as a means of sharing thoughts, emotions and opinions. In this paper, we examine how the selfie culture can be appropriated to encourage more creative, open and participatory approaches for engaging communities through situated technologies. We first review examples of social, spatial and technical aspects of community interactions with situated technologies, such as digital art installations, situated self-representations for sharing with others and social interactions with situated technologies. We then present observations from four field studies in which combinations of urban screens and tablet devices were used for community engagement. Based on an analysis of our observations we outline strategies for using self-representation in interactive urban applications to amplify and encourage engagement with situated technologies in cities.

The aim of this study is to examine, from the perspective of Hyperpersonal Theory, the role of the communication components, sender, receiver, channel, and feedback, in the impression formation of matrimonial sites’ (MSs) users. The study used a sample of Saudi Arabian users to also understand the role of their culture in this process. The findings of the study indicate that senders were selective about presenting themselves and forming positive impressions but very religious users were less selective. As receivers, the important criteria used to form an impression about senders was the extent to which the senders’ online behaviours were in line with Saudi social norms. These findings suggest that the study participants did not totally challenge their social norms when searching for a future spouse through an MS. With regards to the channel, the study participants thought the MS was effective for finding a spouse, supporting the argument that within a gender-segregated society an online setting would carry more information than a face-to-face setting.

Virtual Avatars can bring opportunities for enjoyment, social participation and exploration of identities. However, the configuration of avatar creation software may marginalise some groups of users due to them reinforcing social stereotypes that privilege youth and beauty, rather than representing the broader variety of human identities. Older adults are one group who may be disadvantaged with respect to avatars as avatar studies have typically focused on younger users. Considering that older populations are growing and that their participation in virtual environments is increasing, it is timely to investigate older adults’ preferences in relation to avatars. We conducted a study with 23 participants (70+ years old) to understand the representational requirements of older adults when creating a humanoid virtual avatar. Our findings demonstrate that older adults are negotiating ageing stereotypes when creating a virtual body. These negotiations of body appearances range from: the Actual Avatar that by mirroring the self suggests an acceptance of the ageing body; the Vibrant Avatar, that is idealising the physical condition of the self; the Other Avatar, that aims to explore other identities; and the Companion Avatar, that creates another persona as company. These findings highlight that older adults have specific representational requirements when designing virtual avatars.

Intelligent Personal Assistants (IPAs) have become a mainstream product and often show a high level of variance in terms of their interaction philosophy. For example, Google's Now has no personality at all, whereas personality plays a strong part in the advertisement of Apple's Siri. We have assessed the personality profile of users and their preference for either Apple's Siri, Google's Now or Microsoft's Cortana, based on attractiveness and psychological state reactance. Analysis revealed how the preference for an IPA depends on a person's character traits. Preferences of individual traits are discussed and average profiles for devotees of different IPAs are given. The results can be used to recommend IPAs specifically to a users' personality profile. The work concludes with a number of recommendations for the design of IPAs to address specific personality traits of users.

Interaction with faces expressing emotion is compelling and can focus human attention strongly. A face showing emotion reflects the internal mental state of the displayer of the emotion and is arguably also an attempt to influence the internal mental state of the observer of the displayed emotion. We found that pupillary response patterns can predict the veracity of anger better than the verbal response of the same individual participants. This supports the previous claim for such a result for smiles, from the results on another emotion, anger. Given the significant differences in behavioural responses expected from the literature on smiles versus anger, the unexpected similarity of results suggests that this method could be used in general for detecting the veracity of many emotions. Even using just smiles and anger, we propose that virtual reality or screen avatars expressing such emotions to cajole, brow beat or otherwise enveigle co-operation in settings such as chronic condition management or aged care, could be substantially improved if we can measure the actual perception of the veracity of emotion felt by human beings.

Inspired by this year’s OZCHI conference theme of Human-Nature, this discussion panel asks how interaction designers might respond to existential challenges and refocus efforts away from the business-as-usual of making technology more usable. How might we explore design approaches and strategies that support viable and humane life for all? What commitments can we all make to become research activists?

Virtual Reality (VR) interfaces have been shown to be able to trigger different emotions in users. However, earlier VR interfaces did not provide users with their own heart rate feedback and the effect of such a feedback on overall experience has not been investigated. In this research, we investigate whether providing heart rate feedback enhances the participant’s experience of using VR and we explore the design space of different types of multi-sensory heart rate representations. Through a within-subjects study, and using subjective measurements, we found that participants enjoyed seeing their heart rate feedback when experiencing VR environments. From the different types of heart-rate representations, audio-haptic feedback was the most preferred while visual feedback was reported as being distracting. We report on the implications of this for designing VR experiences and directions for future research.

Virtual reality (VR) games offer potential as a fun and immersive way to get enough physical activity to gain significant health benefits. Currently, there is no established way to describe the type and level of physical activity a person can expect to gain when playing a VR game. Nor is there a way of reporting to a person about the exercise they actually did. To address this, we have designed a visual overview that depicts the nature of exercise an individual actually did. To assess the visualisation, we selected four VR games with very different exercise profiles. We used them in a qualitative study with 7 people, so that we could demonstrate how our visualisation could represent the individual differences in the nature and level of physical activity for each game. Our contribution is the design of the first visualisation to represent the nature of exercise gained in VR games, as a personalised, compact summary of the exertion an individual had in a game.

View management techniques are commonly used for the optimization of labelling layout of objects in augmented reality systems, in which penalty function is an effective method to get the optimal positions of labels. In this paper, an image-driven view management method to superimpose 2D labels to the objects under indoor environments such as sculpture and toy by minimizing penalty function is studied. A new penalty function is proposed to change the orientation of each leader line in the penalty elements and a modified search space method is integrated to improve the quality of labelling layout. Experiments are conducted to evaluate the labelling layout optimized by different penalty functions under different experiment conditions and the comparison of experimental results between different penalty functions shows that the proposed method represents the best results in terms of avoiding occlusion and efficiency to get the optimal layout.

The growth of commercial VR technology has fueled an interest in user embodiment, where a graphical representation of the user, a virtual avatar, enables a more immersive experience and richer interaction. Recent research suggests that older adults are increasingly playing digital games. These factors, combined with the rapidly ageing population, means it is vital that avatar creation software responds to the needs of older adults. Our study seeks to address these needs, by better understanding older adult opinions about virtual avatars that are photorealistic, i.e. bearing likeness to their physical appearances. In our exploratory study, we interviewed six older adults aged between 70 and 80 years and asked them to evaluate 18 photorealistic avatars created with three different commercial avatar creation tools. Results showed that participants were not satisfied with their custom-made avatars due to them missing characteristic features. The results also showed that there was major consensus towards using photorealistic avatars across a range of virtual environments.

We propose an interactive system that implements the technique of Anamorphosis, with a flat-panel display and a cylindrical mirror. In this system, a distorted image is shown on a flat-panel display or a tabletop surface, and the original image will appear on the cylindrical mirror when a user puts it on the display. By detecting the position and rotation angle of the cylinder, the system provides interaction between the user and the image on the cylinder. We developed three applications using this device.

Gesture- and speech-based 3D modeling offers designers a powerful and intuitive way to create 3D Computer Aided Design (CAD) models. Instead of arbitrary gestures and speech commands defined by researchers, which may not be intuitive for users, such a natural user interface should be based on gesture and command set elicited from the users. We describe our ongoing research on a speech-and-gesture-based CAD modeling interface, GesCAD, implemented by combining Microsoft Kinect and Rhino, a leading CAD software. GesCAD is based on gestures and speech commands elicited from a specially designed user experiment. We conducted a preliminary user study with 6 participants to evaluate the user experience of our prototype, such as ease of use, physical comfort and satisfaction with the models created. Results show that participants found the overall experience of using GesCAD fun and the speech and gesture commands easy to remember.

Previous HCI studies have identified challenges when designing public displays that often result in users ignoring them. In this paper, we explore the factors that drive passers-by to become active users and provide suggestions to guide the design of public interactive displays (PIDs). We contrast the findings from two different studies: (1) an observation of existing non-research PIDs to understand the issues currently facing displays in the wild; and (2) a field study of a PID research prototype. Based on the findings from both studies, the paper concludes with a discussion of three factors that have an effect on the utilisation of PIDs: position, content and function.

Rehabilitation exercises following stroke are by necessity repetitive and consequently can be tedious for patients. Hospitals are set up with equipment such as clothes pegs, wooden blocks and mechanical hand counters, which patients use to re-learn how to manipulate objects. The aim of this study is to understand the context of stroke patients rehabilitation as well as which types of feedback are most appropriate for patients when performing their rehabilitation exercises. Over 60 hours were spent observing stroke patients undergoing rehabilitation. Fourteen stroke patients who had attended a balance class were interviewed about their experiences and the feedback they received. From this fieldwork, a set of design guidelines has been developed to guide researchers and designers developing computer-based equipment for stroke patient rehabilitation.

A growing body of HCI research explores designs to support rehabilitation after stroke. While rehabilitation is a major part of a stroke survivor’s recovery, it is not the only part that could benefit from HCI work. This paper aims to provide a rich understanding of the work required by stroke survivors and their caregivers when they leave hospital and transition back to the home environment. We conducted a thematic analysis of 318 posts in an Australian online community. The findings highlight the breadth of work on top of rehabilitation and other efforts to manage the impact of their stroke. The outcome of stroke can affect everyday life work, from household chores to transportation to managing relationships. Stroke survivors also engage in biographical work in an attempt to reconstruct their personal narrative. Based on these findings we discuss opportunities for design: mental health, managing fatigue, intimate relationships, personal reflection, and forming a narrative. We hope that these opportunities will encourage HCI work to support people with chronic conditions in their transition back home.

A growing body of research is exploring the benefits of using digital media to engage people with difficulties due to ageing, including dementia. A simple, tablet-based game was developed with inputs from over 440 stakeholders including occupational therapists, doctors, geriatric psychiatrists and seniors in Singapore. In order to produce effective game concepts, the design team explored domain experts’ fundamental definitions of dementia and how to promote well-being, and also discussed and brainstormed ideas with the geriatric care specialist team. The developed prototype, Piece by Piece, is a game that was crafted to offer a light cognitive challenge through non-competitive, difficulty-adjusted tangram-style puzzles, and promotes well-being through nostalgic content that inspires reminiscence. The voices of our users, both healthy seniors as well as seniors with dementia, along with our observations, led us to implement design decisions that resulted in a more seamless, intuitive gameplay experience. We believe that our experiences in developing the game hold insights for other designers looking to build more inclusive applications to support people with physical/cognitive disabilities, using today’s ubiquitous interactive devices, such as tablets and smartphones.

This paper presents insights into Younger Onset Dementia (YOD) offering clear differentiation in the circumstances, needs and challenges of people with YOD from those with late onset dementia. We point to opportunities for the potential role of digital technology to improve the experiences of people living with YOD. This is important because while HCI has long engaged with dementia, these efforts have been predominantly focused on designing technologies for elderly people experiencing dementia. In particular, the paper highlights concerns raised by people with YOD which have significant impact for HCI researchers when engaging people with YOD in research and in technology design. As such, this paper argues for a broadening of HCI research to include YOD and to rethink current research and design methods in ‘dementia and technology’ settings.

Digital devices play an important role in medical treatment and will in the future play a larger role in connection to cures of health related issues. Traditionally medicine has been tested by clinical double blind, randomized trials to document the efficacy and safety profile. When it comes to the use of digital devices in treatments the protocols from the field of medicine is adopted. The question is whether or not this evidence based approach is useful when dealing with digital devices and whether the understanding of the efficiency of a treatment can be obtained without also looking at usability. Based on a case study of epilepsy, a literature study of protocols for investigating treatments using digital medical devices, the set-up of studies, the design of a current protocol, and finally preliminary results, we discuss if clinical trials have to include usability studies to determine if a treatment is effective.

Accessibility software for motor impairment permits individuals who cannot access electronic devices through traditional input hardware to control desktop computers, tablets or smart phones despite moderate or severe dysfunction of motor control. Due to the relatively small size of the severely motor impaired community and the large fixed costs of developing accessibility software, commercial accessibility software solutions are often relatively expensive, with price ranges between 500-10,000 USD, which renders them unaffordable for a sizable proportion of the motor impaired population. Furthermore, due to the modest potential for profit of the accessibility software market, certain technologically feasible accessibility software solutions are often not even developed by commercial companies. Until recently, open source accessibility software solutions have been relatively scarce and the existing ones do not cover the entire range of available commercial software solutions. In this work, we present an initiative created by scholars at Otago Polytechnic to address this mismatch. We have leveraged capstone projects of our Information Technology degree program to guide students towards the creation of a range of open source accessibility software solutions that are made widely available through an online repository. Thereby, motor impaired users with limited financial means can use our software for free to interact with computers. The open source nature of our projects makes it possible for computationally skilled software developers to extend our software solutions by adding new features or improving existing functionality. We present here the first applications created by our initiative and the corresponding online repository where we make them widely available to address the needs of the financially constrained motor impaired community.

We developed a prototype student-facing dashboard tuned to support post-hoc sensemaking in terms of participation and group effects in the context of collocated brainstorming. Grounding on foundations of small-group collaboration, open learner modelling and brainstorming at large interactive displays, we designed a set of models from behavioural data that can be visually presented to group members. We validated the effectiveness of our dashboard for provoking group reflection by addressing two research questions: (1) What do group members gain from studying measures of egalitarian contribution? and (2) What do group members gain from modelling how they sparked ideas off each other? We report on outcomes from a study with higher education students performing brainstorming. We present evidence from i) descriptive quantitative usage patterns; and ii) qualitative experiential descriptions reported by the students. We conclude the paper with a discussion that can be useful for the community in the design of collective creativity reflection systems.

Idea generation platforms are increasingly striving to become truly collaborative. Prior research suggests that people are inspired when being exposed to ideas of others. While most platforms defer judgment and separate it from the idea generation phase, we hypothesized that asking participants to rate ideas in the idea generation phase, the increased exposure to other people’s ideas would serve as source of inspiration and motivation and would therefore be preferred to a separate feedback phase. In an explorative study with 26 participants we found that preferences on immediate versus deferred judgment of ideas very much diverged. The results of our study suggest that participants that feel already motivated and able are distracted by the integration of feedback, while to others it is highly beneficial in terms of facilitating their idea generation and motivating them further.

This paper presents, ‘Interact’, an interactive backchannel system providing an array of features to both the students and instructors. It allows the students to post comments, ask questions, and rate their understanding of various concepts (pre-populated by the instructor), taught in a lecture session. Additionally, the system employs text analytics using Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA), to extract topics from the comments, and aggregate sentiments for each topic using AFINN-165 wordlist. The instructors can view: (1) top-ranked ‘m’ topics discussed in ‘n’ lectures; (2) sentiment trends for ‘m’ topics, and ‘n’ lectures, including positive and negative words; (3) popular questions asked in ‘n’ lectures. A user-study was conducted with 40 students and 10 academics were interviewed to understand their perception towards the system. Additionally, a crowdsource study examined the effectiveness of aggregation techniques. We believe that Interact will help to improve teaching and develop effective learning, with the aid of automatic processing, summarization and visualization of student feedback obtained through comments, questions and rating concepts.

As learning analytics (LA) systems become more common, teachers and students are often required to not only make sense of the user interface (UI) elements of a system, but also to make meaning that is pedagogically appropriate to the learning context. However, we suggest that the dominant way of thinking about the relationship between representation and meaning results in an overemphasis on the UI, and that re-thinking this relationship is necessary to create systems that can facilitate deeper meaning making. We propose a conceptual view as a basis for discussion among the LA and HCI communities around a different way of thinking about meaning making, specifically that it should be explicit in the design process, provoking greater consideration of system level elements such as algorithms, data structures and information flow. We illustrate the application of the conceptualisation with two cases of LA design in the areas of Writing Analytics and Multi-modal Dashboards.

Data science is now impacting the educational sector, with a growing number of commercial products and research prototypes providing learning dashboards as feedback for both educators and students. From a human-centred computing perspective, the end-user’s interpretation of these visualisations is a critical challenge to design for, with empirical evidence already showing that ‘usable’ visualisations are not necessarily effective from a teaching and learning perspective. Since an educator’s interpretation of visualised data is essentially the construction of a narrative about that student’s progress, we draw on the growing body of work on ‘Data Storytelling’ (DS) as the inspiration for a set of enhancements that could be applied to data visualisations to improve their communicative power. We present a pilot study that explores the effectiveness of these DS elements based on educators’ responses to paper prototypes. The dual purpose is understanding the contribution of each visual element for data storytelling, and the effectiveness of the enhancements when combined. The results suggest that DS elements could add clarity, especially when there are multiple possible stories in a complex visualisation.

As journalism grapples with technological disruption, the value of its practices to audiences, and society more broadly, is being questioned. Journalism is underpinned by a strong value system that modern communication platforms sometimes obscure. Yet we know that technology can be designed to support values —professional and more general human values. In this short paper, we present some initial findings of how students engaged with journalistic values through a human-centred design process. Through researching, designing and reflecting, aspiring journalists explored ideas for technologies that embodied journalistic values. The process revealed value tensions but also perspectives on the design of communication technology.

This paper presents a study on user difficulties with parking meters. Using known Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) concepts as a guide, we explore the reasons for these difficulties and propose recommendations for designers of parking meters to improve the usability and experience. This paper also considers the applicability of these learnings to similar technologies that are of interest to HCI.

The panel of experts from across a range of disciplines including design, health, technology and big data will explore a broad set of issues facing the rapidly changing healthcare sector in light of the emerging developments that include changes to service delivery from provider-centric to user-centric models, increased emphasis on self-management of health, challenges arising from automation and big data and, at the intersection of these, how do we begin to frame questions of ethics and equity of access. Underpinning this discussion are the overarching and foundational questions of: What do we understand as wellbeing? What does it mean to design technology for health and wellbeing?, particularly within transdiscplinary, often methodologically messy processes. And, probably most importantly, how do we know that what we design has value?

An emerging strategy to solve world problems is designing for sharing. Sharing can be defined as contributing or pooling resources to give to another individual or group. One problem that can be solved by using digital technologies to create innovative sharing solutions is food waste. Addressing this issue in a creative way can open opportunities to not only advance resource conservation but also improve social aspects of society. A modified design thinking approach was employed. Research on existing literatures on design for sharing was performed and the problem statement was defined. Personas, a storyboard and user interfaces were then created, and the possible outlook and challenges to confront were discussed. The end result is AirShare; a food sharing service concept that allows people to offer leftovers or unused food to others in need. The food is delivered by drones with smart technology. If properly adopted, this service could support a society that wastes less of the planet’s resources, while bettering community life.

This paper attempts to look at sharing from three angles - community, environment and technology. Sharing is approached as co-production where what is shared is not simply material goods but rather ideas, creativity, pleasure and experience. The paper outlines making as an intrinsic attribute of human nature and how sharing and making can complement each other. Further, it discusses the creation of waste and upcycling as a way of uniting sustainability with making. The paper proposes a solution in the form of an online collaborative community for upcycling products, called Regen. The details of the interaction with the solution are outlined and the solution is analyzed using Triandis‘ Theory of Interpersonal Behaviors (TIB).

In today’s age, the virtual presence of an individual outweighs the physical presence by an alarming margin. It is therefore the responsibility of future innovators, to leverage technology to help people advance in social and environmental systems. In this design intervention, a solution is provided to challenge the lack of physical participation and instill a sense of responsibility towards constructing a better environment. A participatory platform has been conceptualized where people can come together and collectively take care of a plant, building a community in the long run. The human nature of willingness to help and take action is taken into account, which is often hindered by the lack of time and skill acts as a hindrance to the motivation.