With the rise of chronic diseases as the number one cause of death and disability among urban populations, it has become increasingly important to design for healthy environments. There is, however, a lack of interdisciplinary approaches and solutions to improve health and well-being through urban planning and design. This case study offers an HCI solution and approach to design for healthy urban structures and dynamics in existing neighborhoods. We discuss the design process and design of ROOT, an interactive lighting system that aims to stimulate walking and running through supportive, collaborative and social interaction.
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Office well-being aims to explore and support a healthy, balanced and active work style in office environments. Recent work on tangible user interfaces has started to explore the role of physical, tangible interfaces as active interventions to explore how to tackle problems such as inactive work and lifestyles, and increasingly sedentary behaviours. We identify a fragmented research landscape on tangible Office well-being interventions, missing the relationship between interventions, data, design strategies, and outcomes, and behaviour change techniques. Based on the analysis of 40 papers, we identify 7 classifications in tangible Office well-being interventions and analyse the intervention based on their role and foundation in behaviour change. Based on the analysis, we present design considerations for the development of future tangible Office well-being design interventions and present an overview of the current field and future research into tangible Office well-being interventions to design for a healthier and active office environment.
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‘Creating the Difference’ is the theme of the 2014 edition of the Chi Sparks conference. It is also the challenge that the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community is facing today. HCI is a creative field where practitioners engage in design, production, and evaluation of interactions between people and digital technology. Creating excellent interfaces for people, they make a difference in media and systems that people are eager to use. Usability and user experience are fundamental for achieving this, as are abilities at the forefront of technology, but key to a successful difference is getting the right concepts, addressing genuine, intrinsic, human needs. Researchers and practitioners contribute to this area from theory as well as practice by sharing, discussing, and demonstrating new ideas and developments. This is how HCI creates a difference for society, for individuals, businesses, education, and organizations. The difference that an interactive product or service makes might lie in the concept of it but also in the making, the creation of details and the realisation. It is through powerful concepts and exceptional quality of realisation that innovation is truly achieved. At the Chi Sparks 2014 conference, researchers and practitioners in the HCI community convene to share and discuss their efforts on researching and developing methods, techniques, products, and services that enable people to have better interactions with systems and other people. The conference is hosted at The Hague University of Applied Sciences, and proudly built upon the previous conferences in Arnhem (2011) and Leiden (2009). Copyright van de individuele papers ligt bij de betreffende auteurs.
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In this paper we explore the influence of the physical and social environment (the design space) son the formation of shared understanding in multidisciplinary design teams. We concentrate on the creative design meeting as a microenvironment for studying processes of design communication. Our applied research context entails the design of mixed physical–digital interactive systems supporting design meetings. Informed by theories of embodiment that have recently gained interest in cognitive science, we focus on the role of interactive “traces,” representational artifacts both created and used by participants as scaffolds for creating shared understanding. Our research through design approach resulted in two prototypes that form two concrete proposals of how the environment may scaffold shared understanding in design meetings. In several user studies we observed users working with our systems in natural contexts. Our analysis reveals how an ensemble of ongoing social as well as physical interactions, scaffolded by the interactive environment, grounds the formation of shared understanding in teams. We discuss implications for designing collaborative tools and for design communication theory in general.
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In order to empower more people to become more selfreliant in society, interactive products and services should better match the skills and values of diverse user groups. In inclusive design, relevant end-user groups are involved early on and throughout the design and development process, leading to a better user experience. However, for IT businesses not operating in the academic domain, getting access to appropriate user research methods is difficult. This paper describes the design and prototype development of the Include Toolbox, in close cooperation with practitioners of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in IT. It consists of an interactive app paired with a book. The app helps to find suitable research methods for diverse user groups such as older people, people with low literacy, and children. The book offers background information on the advantages of inclusive design, information on different user groups, and best practices shared by other companies.
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Design and research are two fields of knowledge that each has its traditions, methods, standards and practices. These two worlds appear to be quite separate, with researchers investigating what exists, and designers visualising what could be. This book builds a bridge between both worlds by showing how design and research can be integrated to develop a new field of knowledge. This book contains 22 inspiring reflections that demonstrate how the unique qualities of research (aimed at studying the present) and design (aimed at developing the future) can be combined. This book shows that the transdisciplinary approach is applicable in a multitude of sectors, ranging from healthcare, urban planning, circular economy, and the food industry. Arranged in five parts, the book offers a range of illustrative examples, experiences, methods, and interpretations. Together they make up the characteristic of a mosaic, each piece contributing a part of the complete picture, and all pieces together offering a multi-facted perspective of what applied design research is, how it is implemented and what the reader can expect from it.
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Designing solutions for complex behaviour change processes can be greatly aided by integrating insights from the behavioural sciences into design practice. However, this integration is hampered by the relative inaccessibility of behavioral scientific knowledge. Working in a multidisciplinary of design researchers and behavioural scientists may bridge the gap between the two fields. This paper shares our experiences in working as such a multidisciplinary group on a large project, amongst others consisting of the design of interventions for workplace safety. Our cooperation was fruitful, both for design researchers – being able to better structure the messiness of the design process –, behavioural scientists – gaining in ecological validity of their methods –, and commissioners – increased trust in potential outcomes of the design process. However, difficulties preventing synergy also transpired.
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Walking meetings are a promising way to reduce unhealthy sedentary behavior at the office. Some aspects of walking meetings are however hard to assess using traditional research approaches that do not account well for the embodied experience of walking meetings. We conducted a series of 16 bodystorming sessions, featuring unusual walking meeting situations to engage participants (N=45) in a reflective experience. After each bodystorming, participants completed three tasks: a body map, an empathy map, and a rating of workload using the NASA-TLX scale. These embodied explorations provide insights on key themes related to walking meetings: material and tools, physical and mental demand, connection with the environment, social dynamics, and privacy. We discuss the role of technology and opportunities for technology-mediated walking meetings. We draw implications for the design of walking meeting technologies or services to account for embodied experiences, and the individual, social, and environmental factors at play.
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Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) aims to provide insights into the inner workings and the outputs of AI systems. Recently, there’s been growing recognition that explainability is inherently human-centric, tied to how people perceive explanations. Despite this, there is no consensus in the research community on whether user evaluation is crucial in XAI, and if so, what exactly needs to be evaluated and how. This systematic literature review addresses this gap by providing a detailed overview of the current state of affairs in human-centered XAI evaluation. We reviewed 73 papers across various domains where XAI was evaluated with users. These studies assessed what makes an explanation “good” from a user’s perspective, i.e., what makes an explanation meaningful to a user of an AI system. We identified 30 components of meaningful explanations that were evaluated in the reviewed papers and categorized them into a taxonomy of human-centered XAI evaluation, based on: (a) the contextualized quality of the explanation, (b) the contribution of the explanation to human-AI interaction, and (c) the contribution of the explanation to human- AI performance. Our analysis also revealed a lack of standardization in the methodologies applied in XAI user studies, with only 19 of the 73 papers applying an evaluation framework used by at least one other study in the sample. These inconsistencies hinder cross-study comparisons and broader insights. Our findings contribute to understanding what makes explanations meaningful to users and how to measure this, guiding the XAI community toward a more unified approach in human-centered explainability.
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This deaf-led work critically explores Deaf Tech, challenging conventional understandings of technologies ‘for’ deaf people as merely assistive and accessible, since these understandings are predominantly embedded in medical and audist ideologies. By employing participatory speculative workshops, deaf participants from different European countries envisioned technologies on Eyeth - a mythical planet inhabited by deaf people - centered on their perspectives and curiosities. The results present a series of alternative socio-technical narratives that illustrate qualitative aspects of technologies desired by deaf people. This study advocates for expanding the scope of deaf technological landscapes, emphasizing the needs of establishing deaf-centered HCI, including the development of methods and concepts that truly prioritize deaf experiences in the design of technologies intended for their use.
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