Animated Public Furniture as an Interaction Mediator: Engaging Passersby In-the-Wild with Robotic BenchesUrban HCI investigates how digital technologies shape human behaviour within the social, spatial, temporal dynamics of public space. Meanwhile, robotic furniture research demonstrates how the purposeful animation of mundane utilitarian elements can influence human behaviour in everyday contexts. Taken together, these strands highlight an untapped opportunity to investigate how animated public furniture could mediate social interaction in urban environments. In this paper, we present the design process and in-the-wild study of mobile robotic benches that reconfigure with a semi-outdoor public space. Our findings show that the gestural performance of the benches manifested three affordances perceived by passersby, they activated engagement as robots, redistributed engagement as spatial elements, and settled engagement as infrastructure. We proposed an Affordance Transition Model (ATM) describing how robotic furniture could proactively facilitate transition between these affordances to engage passersby. Our study bridges robotic furniture and urban HCI to activate human experience with the built environment purposefully.2026XYXinyan Yu et al.School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of SydneySmart Cities & Urban SensingSocial Robot InteractionPhysical-Digital Hybrid InteractionCHI
Revealing the Power Dynamics of Collaborative Sense-Making supported by Participatory Data PhysicalizationWhile it is proven that the individual construction of a data physicalization aids personal sense-making, little is known about how sense-making is negotiated when it is shared by multiple, co-located participants. Since participatory data physicalization can inadvertently prioritize dominant views, we interpreted data feminism principles to design a collaborative physicalization construction process that empowers stakeholders and participants to co-determine how meanings are represented. This process revealed how the interplay of physical and non-physical actions during construction negotiations supported collaborative sense-making among 14 groups of 55 participants during 4 workshops, enabling us to articulate how explicit power is embodied by the physicalization artifact and negotiated between authoring and collaborating participants, and facilitators; whereas tacit power operates through artifact meanings, participant identity and design decisions. By providing one operationalization of data-feminist critique into the form of design requirements, our contributions support the design of more equitable physicalization and visualization construction methods.2026SCSilvia Cazacu et al.KU LeuvenData PhysicalizationAlgorithmic Fairness & BiasParticipatory DesignCHI
Infrastructuring Critical Data Literacy through Role-playing: a Retrospective Study of the Game "Silicon Roundabout"Organisations require diverse technological infrastructures to create value from data. Because these infrastructures are often haphazardly developed, they cause frictions between the socio-technical agencies of the involved stakeholders. Silicon Roundabout is a role-playing game consisting of cards, tiles and tokens that was specifically designed to support such stakeholders to experience, understand and reflect on how data infrastructures should be developed and maintained. Although the game has reached more than 20 organisations in 8 different countries since its original release 8 years ago, little is known about how its resources and rules actually elicit critical reflection among its players. By conducting a retrospective qualitative study consisting of 27 interviews with stakeholders, we uncovered that the prototypical role-playing narrative drives critical reflection through 3 facilitation approaches and 3 play strategies that are anchored in organisational contexts shared among players. We are thus able to present three contributions: 1) a retrospective study grounded in interviews with actual stakeholders being affected by the game; 2) an overview of play strategies and facilitation approaches that enacted the infrastructuring processes through role-play; and 3) critical considerations to operationalise how role-play supports learning, situated in real-world contexts and shaped by facilitation. This study calls for a critical examination of the role of interpretation during learning activities to empower stakeholders in reclaiming control over organisational practices.2025SCSilvia Cazacu et al.Digital Divides, Digital LiteracyCSCW
To Cuddle, Mingle, Venture, or Guide: How Architectural Affordances Influence the Experience of Social VR PlacesSocial virtual reality (VR) encompasses a growing network of three-dimensional virtual worlds where users interact in a shared, embodied way. While research has focused on the social interactions between the users themselves, less is known about how the design of virtual spaces influences these interactions. Our study combines interviews with 15 social VR users logging over 1,000 hours and a 20-hour spatial protocol of a purposeful sampling of VR worlds. We analysed how spatial characteristics (including proportion, sightlines, materiality, atmosphere, and navigation) influence meaningful user interaction to turn space into place. We synthesised four place types for a new social VR typology: Cuddle worlds that encourage cosy conversations; Mingle worlds that facilitate new encounters; Venture worlds that promote exploration; and Guided worlds that elicit a sense of belonging with the online community. By relating architectural affordances to social patterns, we contribute insights towards the purposeful design of social VR places.2025JHJihae Han et al.Social & Collaborative VRImmersion & Presence ResearchVisualization Perception & CognitionDIS
Disentangling the Power Dynamics in Participatory Data PhysicalisationParticipatory data physicalisation (PDP) is recognised for its potential to support data-driven decisions among stakeholders who collaboratively construct physical elements into commonly insightful visualisations. Like all participatory processes, PDP is however influenced by underlying power dynamics that might lead to issues regarding extractive participation, marginalisation, or exclusion, among others. We first identified the decisions behind these power dynamics by developing an ontology that synthesises critical theoretical insights from both visualisation and participatory design research, which were then systematically applied unto a representative corpus of 23 PDP artefacts. By revealing how shared decisions are guided by different agendas, this paper presents three contributions: 1) a cross-disciplinary ontology that facilitates the systematic analysis of existing and novel PDP artefacts and processes; which leads to 2) six PDP agendas that reflect the key power dynamics in current PDP practice, revealing the diversity of orientations towards stakeholder participation in PDP practice; and 3) a set of critical considerations that should guide how power dynamics can be balanced, such as by reflecting on how issues are represented, data is contextualised, participants express their meanings, and how participants can dissent with flexible artefact construction. Consequently, this study advances a feminist research agenda by guiding researchers and practitioners in openly reflecting on and sharing responsibilities in data physicalisation and participatory data visualisation.2025SCSilvia Cazacu et al.KU LeuvenData PhysicalizationParticipatory DesignCHI
Manifesting Architectural Subspaces with Two Mobile Robotic Partitions to Facilitate Spontaneous Office MeetingsAlthough intended to foster spontaneous interactions among workers, a typical open-plan office layout cannot mitigate visual, acoustic, or privacy-related distractions that originate from unplanned meetings. As office workers often refrain from tackling these issues by manually demarcating or physically relocating to a more suitable subspace that is enclosed by movable partitions, we hypothesise that these subspaces could instead be robotically manifested. This study therefore evaluated the perceived impact of two mobile robotic partitions that were wizarded to jointly manifest an enclosed subspace, to: 1) either `mitigate' or `intervene' in the distractions caused by spontaneous face-to-face or remote meetings; or 2) either `gesturally' or `spatially' nudge a distraction-causing worker to relocate. Our findings suggest how robotic furniture should interact with office workers with and through transient space, and autonomously balance the distractions not only for each individual worker but also for multiple workers sharing the same workspace.2025OBOzan Balcı et al.KU Leuven, Research[x]Design - Department of ArchitectureDomestic RobotsKnowledge Worker Tools & WorkflowsNotification & Interruption ManagementCHI
Superarchitectural: Challenging the Architectural Design of the MetaverseThe metaverse is an immersive virtual realm that allows millions of users to interact with each other, both described by the social intricacies of the everyday and unrestrained by the physical limitations of reality. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, the metaverse tends to simulate the architectural conventions of physical reality. By visiting the virtual reality sites of 30 interiors, buildings, and plazas within popular metaverse platforms, we identified outliers in convention to curate a `Metaverse Design Catalogue' of architectural features that were uncommon or unrealistic in physical reality. We thus challenged 21 architectural experts to use the catalogue as a catalyst to design an architecture that goes beyond convention to become `superarchitectural'. Based on their redesigned and reimagined floor plans and perspective drawings, we inform the design language of a superarchitectural metaverse through the dimensions of architectural diegesis, mutability, and asymmetry.2024JHJihae Han et al.Mixed Reality WorkspacesInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
Meaning Follows Purpose: Unravelling the Architectural Design Conventions in the Contemporary MetaverseThousands of people regularly meet, work and play in the architectural spaces that the metaverse offers today. Yet despite the creative potential to disrupt how the built environment is represented, there exists a prevalent belief that the architectural design of the metaverse is rather conventional and reliant on simulating physical reality. We investigated this claim by conducting a design critique study of the most apparent architectural design conventions within the current most popular metaverse platforms, as determined by a scoping review and Google Trends analysis. Based on the opinions of 21 architectural experts on the design of interiors, buildings, and plazas within these platforms, we elicited three overarching design conventions that capture the representation, engagement, and purpose of metaverse architecture. By discussing the impact of these conventions on architectural quality, we inform the future design of metaverse spaces to more purposefully, and perhaps less frequently, use realism to convey meaning.2024JHJihae Han et al.KU LeuvenImmersion & Presence ResearchIdentity & Avatars in XRInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
The Adaptive Architectural Layout: How the Control of a Semi-Autonomous Mobile Robotic Partition was Shared to Mediate the Environmental Demands and Resources of an Open-Plan OfficeA typical open-plan office layout is unable to optimally host multiple collocated work activities, personal needs, and situational events, as its space exerts a range of environmental demands on workers in terms of maintaining their acoustic, visual or privacy comfort. As we hypothesise that these demands could be coped by optimising the environmental resources of the architectural layout, we deployed a mobile robotic partition that autonomously manoeuvres between predetermined locations. During a five-weeks in-the-wild study within a real-world open-plan office, we studied how 13 workers adopted four distinct adaptation strategies when sharing the spatiotemporal control of the robotic partition. Based on their logged and self-reported reasoning, we present six initiation regulating factors that determine the appropriateness of each adaptation strategy. This study thus contributes to how future human-building interaction could autonomously improve the experience, comfort, performance, and even the health and wellbeing of multiple workers that share the same workplace.2024ANAlex Binh Vinh Duc Nguyen et al.KU LeuvenInclusive DesignParticipatory DesignCHI
PosterTalk: Expanding Participatory Agency in Public Survey Platforms via Middle-Out GatekeepingPublic surveys intend to integrate civic values into official decision-making. Because such surveys are typically infrastructured from the top-down, citizens' participatory agency is often reduced to reacting to concerns that may not align with their bottom-up needs. This paper presents PosterTalk, a physically situated and digitally facilitated middle-out survey platform that explicitly involved bottom-up citizens in its gatekeeping activities. Over a four months in-the-wild deployment, PosterTalk accumulated 41 inquiries and 420 responses spanning over 13 civic themes. Its emerging survey content directly influenced the local policy agenda of the facilitating neighbourhood committee, and nudged them to reassess their civic representativeness. By critically analysing the different survey content and stakeholder engagements, this paper contributes an encompassing middle-out framework to guide and benchmark participatory agency in future public survey deployments and offers four guidelines for diversifying bottom-up civic agendas, readjusting top-down representation, avoiding bottom-up misperceptions of power, and promoting top-down introspection.2023PBPaul Biedermann et al.Community Engagement & Civic TechnologyParticipatory DesignDIS
Architectural Narrative VR: Towards Generatively Designing Natural Walkable SpacesThe current state of Virtual Reality (VR) presents a limited and underwhelming user experience. Users are restricted from naturally walking beyond the physical boundaries of the real world, unable to fully explore large virtual environments. The virtual manifestation also often mirrors the physical features of the real world, neglecting the limitless possibilities of the virtual universe. In response to this limitation, this pictorial introduces Architectural Narrative VR, a generative environment that dynamically designs spaces on-the-fly. This approach enables users to roam freely within the constraints of their physical space, while the architectural proportions and rhythm of virtual spaces are designed to relate to external factors such as the sequential presentation of content and user behaviour. This work contributes to VR research by exploring new ways of generating virtual spaces that prioritise user-dependent rather than predefined manifestations of the architectural narrative, offering greater potential for immersive and multidimensional user experiences.2023JHJihae Han et al.Immersion & Presence ResearchInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
Engaging Passers-by with Rhythm: Applying Feedforward Learning to a Xylophonic Media Architecture FacadeMedia architecture exploits interactive technology to encourage passers-by to engage with an architectural environment. Whereas most media architecture installations focus on visual stimulation, we developed a permanent media facade that rhythmically knocks xylophone blocks embedded beneath 11 window sills, according to the human actions constantly traced via an overhead camera. In an attempt to overcome its apparent limitations in engaging passers-by more enduringly and purposefully, our study investigates the impact of feedforward learning, a constructive interaction method that instructs passers-by about the results of their actions. Based on a comparative (n=25) and a one-month in-the-wild (n=1877) study, we propose how feedforward learning could empower passers-by to understand the interaction of more abstract types of media architecture, and how particular quantitative indicators capturing this learning could predict how enduringly and purposefully a passer-might engage. We believe these contributions could inspire more creative integrations of non-visual modalities in future public interactive interventions.2023ANAlex Binh Vinh Duc Nguyen et al.KU LeuvenHaptic WearablesDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceCHI
Towards Responsive Architecture that Mediates Place: Recommendations on How and When an Autonomously Moving Robotic Wall Should Adapt a Spatial LayoutResponsive architecture envisions the built environment to adapt to the changing needs of its occupants dynamically. Although it is increasingly feasible to move space-defining objects like room dividers by mobile robots, little is known about how or when such spatial adaptations should occur. We therefore measured the experience of 26 occupants while they performed six different activities inside an office breakout room that was being adapted by a robotically moving wall in either a reactive or proactive way. Based on these empirical findings, we propose how autonomous spatial adaptation should primarily aim to balance the spatial, situational and subjective qualities of the resulting sense of place. We also define eight distinct design recommendations that exploit the unique affordances of spatial adaptation. By asserting that future advances in human-building interaction (HBI) should be based on creating appropriate places rather than controlling functional spaces, we foresee how responsive architecture might become as compelling as its static counterpart.2022BNBinh Vinh Duc Nguyen et al.Human-Robot Interaction; Human-Robot InteractionCSCW
Co-gnito: a Participatory Physicalization Game for Urban Mental MappingThis study introduces Co-gnito, a participatory physicalization game that supports collaborative urban mental mapping through storytelling. Through Co-gnito we investigate gaming as a means to elicit subjective spatial experiences and to steer the synchronous construction of a physicalization that aligns and represents them. Evaluating Co-gnito with 28 players, we found that storytelling as a gaming mechanic, motivated the gradual addition of personal contributions towards a collective outcome, but that the reward system did not nudge the mapping direction as expected. We also demonstrate how the shared construction process of a physicalization was influenced by the negotiation of the data encoding scheme, the token physical affordances, and the game mechanics. We therefore believe that our core contributions, comprising of: a working research prototype; an augmentation of the physicalization pipeline towards collaborative settings; and a set of reflective considerations, provide actionable knowledge on how to design participatory physicalizations in the future.2022GPGeorgia Panagiotidou et al.Design FictionInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingC&C