Participatory Design with Domain Experts: A Delphi Study for a Career Support ChatbotWe present a study of collaboration with expert participants for the purpose of the responsible design of a conversational agent. The Delphi study was used to identify and develop design and evaluation criteria for an automated career support intervention. Career support tasks present complex design problems as they are highly personalized and the definition of success for a single intervention is ambiguous. The study engaged domain experts in a structured communication process to explore the opportunities and risks of introducing a conversational agent to complement existing services provided to young people. Three rounds of questionnaires were used to build consensus across the expert panel. The questionnaire design incorporated design fictions, qualitative data from the panel, and requirement statements. The study produced a validated set of criteria that can be used for the design and evaluation of a conversational agent, that aligns with professional ethics and intended outcomes for a career support intervention. Our approach demonstrates the value of mixed method Delphi studies to facilitate participatory design of conversational user experiences by bridging knowledge gaps between technical and domain experts. The resulting evaluation criteria establish a meaningful foundation for future human-centered conversation design for career support.2024MWMarianne Wilson et al.Conversational ChatbotsParticipatory DesignCUI
Art Directing Blended ExperiencesInteractions between the physical and the digital have become increasingly ubiquitous. They are particularly challenging to visualize and illustrate, as they usually unfold over time and space and involve multiple devices, locations, services, and actors. Traditional approaches to sketching user experiences and storyboarding fall short of clearly illustrating how meaningful relationships between people, things, technology, and places are created when they are consistently transitioning from physical spaces into digital spaces and back again. To address this gap, the pictorial showcases how a design framework based on blending theory informs our illustrative best practices and techniques for Art Directing Blended Experiences. The pictorial further discusses the opportunities and challenges of this narrative sketching technique to help designers further explore and capture the essence of how things, relationships, people, and change weave together new personal social spaces and deeper meanings of physical place.2024MMMichael Mastermaker et al.Design FictionInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
WAVE: Anticipatory Movement Visualization for VR DancingDance games are one of the most popular game genres in Virtual Reality (VR), and active dance communities have emerged on social VR platforms such as VR Chat. However, effective instruction of dancing in VR or through other computerized means remains an unsolved human-computer interaction problem. Existing approaches either only instruct movements partially, abstracting away nuances, or require learning and memorizing symbolic notation. In contrast, we investigate how realistic, full-body movements designed by a professional choreographer can be instructed on the fly, without prior learning or memorization. Towards this end, we describe the design and evaluation of WAVE, a novel anticipatory movement visualization technique where the user joins a group of dancers performing the choreography with different time offsets, similar to spectators making waves in sports events. In our user study (N=36), the participants more accurately followed a choreography using WAVE, compared to following a single model dancer.2024MLMarkus Laattala et al.Aalto UniversityFull-Body Interaction & Embodied InputSocial & Collaborative VRDance & Body Movement ComputingCHI
“It’s not just for the Past but it’s for the Here and Now”: Gift-Giver Perspectives on the Memory Machine to Gift Digital MemoriesWe present the design of the Memory Machine (MeMa), a technology probe that can store, contextualise, and document media to represent memories. We accumulate vast physical and digital possessions throughout our lives, making it difficult to distinguish value in amassed images, albums, videos, mementos, and music. One option we wanted to explore via MeMa was to frame personal memories as a gift, in turn providing a way to revisit, share, and collate personal archives. We deployed MeMa into participants' homes and tasked them to create a digital gift involving an autobiographical memory. Through qualitative methods we uncovered the experience of twelve gift-givers. We found that the framing as a gift brought meaning to a collection of media, promoting reflection and emotional reminiscence in participants. Our contributions include design implications involving the relationship between emotions, technology, and gifting.2023RGRebecca Gibson et al.Knowledge Worker Tools & WorkflowsMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
FestForward: Participatory Design Futuring and World-Building for Equitable Digital Futures in Performing Arts FestivalsFestForward is a fictional, local, cultural magazine, set in 2030, designed to stimulate conversations about equitable and sustainable digital futures in performing arts festivals. This extensive design fiction was developed through a series of participatory workshops, where creative and cultural practitioners responded to various ‘provotypes’ suggesting narrative content for the magazine. In this pictorial, we annotate and unpack the making of FestForward to reflect upon various formats and approaches to design futuring, and to offer a platform for further world-building, research and discussion on equitable digital futures in arts festivals.2023CEChris Elsden et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIDesign FictionInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
Designing Blended Experiences: Laugh TradersDigital transformation is increasingly blurring the line between what is software and what is the world, requiring designers to harmoniously blend digital and physical products, services and spaces if they want to orchestrate meaningful experiences that are specifically aimed at the interweaving relationships between people, places and things. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design, and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. The pictorial details the results of a twelve-day workshop focusing on real-world audience and performer problems during the Edinburgh Festival Fringe: it illustrates how two distinct tools, the Blended Experiences Tool and the Evaluation Tool, focusing on the creation of a blended experience and respectively meant to provide a structured way to approach the generative and reflective stages of the design process, can be used to address this gap. This pictorial illustrates the theoretical framing supporting the Blended Experiences Tool; describes how the workshop produced Laugh Traders, a speculative experience centering on attending and reviewing comedy shows; provides a page-by-page pictorial storyboard of the Laugh Trader experience; introduces the Evaluation Tool and applies it to Laugh Trader to measure the relevance, complexity, and attractiveness of the resulting blended experience. Preliminary reflections conclude the pictorial.2023BOBRIAN J OKEEFE et al.Design FictionDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingC&C
Designing Blended ExperiencesThe increasing ubiquity of interactions as a mix between digital content and physical objects and spaces brings about new challenges for designers. There is a need to embed digital systems in physical places, whether those are existing physical structures or existing digital platforms. Traditional approaches to product design, interaction design and user experience design do not often take this new context into account. They do not consider how designers produce new digital and physical experiences that work harmoniously to provide new forms of engagement. To address this, we illustrate the constructs of blended experiences and how they can be used in the context of bridging green spaces between different countries. We propose the idea of blended experiences and offer a framework of constructs and techniques that can help designers work in this emerging area of design.2021BOBrian OKeefe et al.Sustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)DIS
Maker Movements, Do-It-Yourself Cultures and Participatory Design: Implications for HCI Research.Falling costs and the wider availability of computational components, platforms and ecosystems have enabled the expansion of maker movements and DIY cultures. This can be considered as a form of democratization of technology systems design, in alignment with the aims of Participatory Design approaches. However, this landscape is constantly evolving, and long-term implications for the HCI community are far from clear. The organizers of this one-day workshop invite participants to present their case studies, experiences and perspectives on the topic with the goal of increasing understanding within this area of research. The outcomes of the workshop will include the articulation of future research directions with the purpose of informing a research agenda, as well as the establishment of new collaborations and networks.2018MSMichael Smyth et al.Edinburgh Napier UniversityMakerspace CultureParticipatory DesignComputational Methods in HCICHI
Motion Correlation: Selecting Objects by Matching Their MovementSelection is a canonical task in user interfaces, commonly supported by presenting objects for acquisition by pointing. In this article, we consider motion correlation as an alternative for selection. The principle is to represent available objects by motion in the interface, have users identify a target by mimicking its specific motion, and use the correlation between the system’s output with the user’s input to determine the selection. The resulting interaction has compelling properties, as users are guided by motion feedback, and only need to copy a presented motion. Motion correlation has been explored in earlier work but only recently begun to feature in holistic interface designs. We provide a first comprehensive review of the principle, and present an analysis of five previously published works, in which motion correlation underpinned the design of novel gaze and gesture interfaces for diverse application contexts. We derive guidelines for motion correlation algorithms, motion feedback, choice of modalities, overall design of motion correlation interfaces, and identify opportunities and challenges identified for future research and design.2018EVEduardo Velloso et al.The University of MelbourneHand Gesture RecognitionFull-Body Interaction & Embodied InputCHI