Papers

"Deprived of support because we're born women": Emerging Socio-Technical Pathways and Evolving Struggles for Women Entrepreneurs in Bangladesh

Women's entrepreneurship is a key driver of socio-economic empowerment in the Global South, yet patriarchal sociocultural contexts limit entrepreneur’s autonomy and, despite increasing attention to gender issues in HCI, shifting digital infrastructures cause privacy, security, and logistical challenges. We conduct 15 interviews with women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh who rely on digital technology, offering insight into who they are, their business and supply chains, technology use, and the gendered challenges of balancing work with family. We present women’s accounts of navigating in-person and online harassment and crime, including through payment platforms, and banking tools that legally enforce gender discrimination. We discuss how digital technology design must adapt to these pervasive issues and propose digital interventions to support developing their businesses and achieving financial independence. Our work contributes to understanding how HCI can take a transformative role in overcoming barriers and advancing mechanisms for women's financial empowerment in the Global South.

Digital technology for supporting Aged Care Services: A Scoping Review

Digital technology has great potential to support human health, including the complex needs of older adults in aged care services and treatments. This scoping review aims to explore the current state and roles of digital technology in supporting aged care following the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. We included 47 studies from the last 10 years covering five databases discussing the development, implementation, evaluation, or review of digital technology in aged care services and the broader clinical system. Seven key roles of digital technology were identified, including health monitoring and assessment, remote healthcare services, assistive technology to support treatment, self-care management, social technology to facilitate interaction, clinical decision support, and aged care quality measurement carried out by twelve technology types. Our findings show the potential of digital technology in enhancing the capability and efficiency of aged care services for developing or improving socio-technical aged care systems. We conclude with six recommendations for future research.

TiiS: AOI-shapes: supporting interactive visualization of user-defined urban areas of interest

Designing for Transformative Futures: Creative Practice, Social Change and Climate Emergency

We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societal issues related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, small-scale actions. Drawing on our first-hand perspectives, we reflect on how the cases address such issues by proliferating across different social contexts and supporting creative engagements of diverse stakeholders. We offer this empirical reflection at a time of rapid social and ecological change that has affected all life on the planet. Eco-social challenges and structural inequalities caused by shifts in global economic, political and technological power require new approaches and transformative actions to stabilize and restore ecosystems on which life depends. Our research shows that creative practice in art and design has a critical role to play in these processes of transformation. By discussing the opportunities and challenges encountered by our three cases within their transformative efforts and analyzing how they proliferate across diverse scales, we aim to expand the emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice.

Evaluating an App to Promote a Better Visit Through Shared Activities for People Living with Dementia and their Families

This project aims to foster shared positive experiences between people living with moderate to advanced dementia and their visitors as they may struggle to find topics to talk about and engaging things to do together. To promote a better visit, we trialed a previously developed app that includes eight games with twenty-one residents and their partners or carers across four care centers for three months each. Through interviews and data logging, we found that residents preferred games that were closer to their interests and skills, and that gameplay and cooperation fostered meaningful and shared interactions between residents and their visitors. The contribution of this work is twofold: (1) insights and opportunities into dyadic interactions when using an app and into promoting positive social experiences through technology design, and (2) reflections on the challenges of evaluating the benefits of technology for people living with dementia.

Diagramming Working Field Theories for Design in the HCI Classroom

HCI has historically provided little support for moving from fieldwork insights or theories to design outcomes. Having witnessed many students struggle and then justify their designs with a form of marketing hype, we developed a supporting approach of “field theories”. A field theory is a working theory about salient interactions in a particular domain and sensitizing concepts in order to frame design investigations. It is presented visually in a field theory diagram to support succinct communication and critique. Studying use of design prototypes that have been informed by a field theory helps to reflect upon and refine the theory. In this paper we present examples from our HCI classes and reflections based on interviews with students. We discuss how field theories offer an orientation in the spirit of a ‘bricoleur’ who harnesses elements of theory and practice to produce deeper understandings and more fitting outcomes for the task at hand.

"I Understand, Mate": A Co-designed Comic-based Digital Story from 'Down Under'

Australian rural communities face challenges including climatic changes, social isolation, low levels of digital literacy, and higher levels of mental health issues. New services are tailored to meet those most at risk, and to reach and support local people. We showcase a contextually situated, comics-based illustrated digital story. This was co-designed and developed to reach rural men experiencing mental health issues ‘Down Under’ in rural Australia. Spring-boarding on traditional digital storytelling techniques, we discuss the process of identifying, capturing, co-designing and sharing the illustrated digital story. We highlight how comics may authentically capture and communicate rural mental health issues, while recognising the complexities inherent in this process. Ultimately, we argue co-designed comic-based digital storytelling has potential for sharing rural mental health promotion messages, and service support, with rural community members.

Exploring the Non-Use of Mobile Devices in Families through Provocative Design

Mobile devices are fast becoming an integral part of family life. While mobile technology provides constant connectivity to a world outside the home, it inevitably disrupts family dynamics and the social notion of being together. In this paper, we explore “non-use” of mobile technology in a family setting. To do this, we designed the Pup-Lock provotype, a design provocation intended to challenge established expectations and practices around mobile device use at home. We report on a five-week in-depth study of using Pup-Lock with three families reflecting on their mobile device usage and their experience of non-use. Our findings illustrate how mobile use shapes social expectations and how over-use creates tensions in families. We contribute by showing how provoking non-use through design results in desirable and meaningful ways to increase family interaction. We discuss implications of designing for non-use to challenge established domestic practices around technology use.

Disrupting (More-than-) Human-Food Interaction: Experimental Design, Tangibles and Food-Tech Futures

Digital technology has become a frequent companion of daily food practices, shaping the ways we produce, consume, and interact with food. Smart kitchenware, diet tracking apps, and other techno-solutions carry promise for healthy and sustainable food futures but are often problematic in their impact on food cultures. We conducted four Human-Food Interaction (HFI) workshops to reflect on and anticipate food-tech issues, using experimental food design co-creation as our primary method. At the workshops, food and food practices served as the central research theme and accessible starting point to engage stakeholders and explore values, desires, and imaginaries associated with food-tech. Drawing on these explorations, we discuss diverse roles that experimental design co-creation, performed with and around food, can play in supporting critical, interdisciplinary HFI inquiries. Our findings will appeal to design researchers interested in food as a research theme or as a tangible (and compostable!) design material affording diverse co-creative engagements.

Evaluating the Combination of Visual Communication Cues for HMD-based Mixed Reality Remote Collaboration

Many researchers have studied various visual communication cues (e.g. pointer, sketching, and hand gesture) in Mixed Reality remote collaboration systems for real-world tasks. However, the effect of combining them has not been so well explored. We studied the effect of these cues in four combinations: hand only, hand + pointer, hand + sketch, and hand + pointer + sketch, with three problem tasks: Lego, Tangram, and Origami. The study results showed that the participants completed the task significantly faster and felt a significantly higher level of usability when the sketch cue is added to the hand gesture cue, but not with adding the pointer cue. Participants also preferred the combinations including hand and sketch cues over the other combinations. However, using additional cues (pointer or sketch) increased the perceived mental effort and did not improve the feeling of co-presence. We discuss the implications of these results and future research directions.

Designing Recipes for Digital Food Futures

Digital food technologies such as diet trackers, food sharing apps, and 'smart' kitchenware offer promising yet debatable food futures. While proponents suggest its potential to prompt efficient food lifestyles, critics highlight the underlying technosolutionism of digital food innovation and limitations related to health safety and data privacy. This workshop addresses both present and near-future digital food controversies and seeks to extend the existing body of Human-Food Interaction (HFI) research. Through scenarios and food-tech prototyping navigated by bespoke Digital Food Cards, we will unpack issues and suggest possible design approaches. We invite proposals from researchers, designers, and other practitioners interested in working towards a complex framework for future HFI research.