Get a Grip on Stress with Grippy!: A Field Study to Understand Human-Wearable Partnerships in Stress Management

Smart wearables are increasingly used to help people deal with stress. Still, a less explored area of research in this field concerns the partnerships that smart wearables can take on when engaging people in stress-coping activities. To facilitate further understanding of the human-wearable partnerships, we designed Grippy, a smart wearable...

Shift and Blend: Understanding the hybrid character of computing artefacts on a tool-agent spectrum

In the context of human-agent interaction, we see the emergence of computational artefacts that display hybridity because they can be experienced as tools and agents. In this paper we propose a tool-agent spectrum as an analytical lens that uses ‘intention’ as a central concept. This spectrum aims to clarify how a computational object can change...

Things that help out: Designing smart wearables as partners in stress management

We propose an approach to designing smart wearables that act as partners to help people cope with stress in daily life. Our approach contributes to the developing field of smart wearables by addressing how technological capabilities can be designed to establish partnerships that consider the person, the situation, and the appropriate type of...

Designing tactful objects for sensitive settings: A case study on families dealing with childhood cancer

In the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), there is an increasing interest in designing for well-being. With this contribution, we introduce Tactful Objects as a design perspective on interactive artifacts that empower people in sensitive settings. We explore the concept of tactfulness by designing two interactive artifacts addressing...

Expressive/Sensitive: Full day workshop at DIS 2020

Our interactions form an intricate 'dance' - a dance requiring a fluent integration of both expressivity (e.g. to approach someone) and sensitivity (e.g. detect if you 'should' approach someone). Work on behaving artefacts has focused mostly on the social, emotional and aesthetic qualities that can be evoked - expressed - through interactions...

Objects with intent: Designing Everyday Things as Collaborative Partners

In HCI there is an increasing trend to approach computing artifacts as agents. In this article, we make a case for "Objects with Intent" (OwI's) as an emerging type of agents that take advantage of the meaning of everyday things as the site for their intelligence and agency. After reviewing relevant existing research in HCI and related fields...

Towards the maturation of design: From smart to wise products

Recent years have shown the introduction of several types of smart products. These products gather data about user behaviour and try to determine an optimal response, in order to make the user’s life easier. However, some smart products also lead to user behaviour that is undesirable. Hence, we would like to introduce a new design paradigm...

Explorations in Social Interaction Design

This one-day workshop brings together HCI scholars and practitioners who share a common interest in understanding and exploring how we will be socially connected in the future. Central to our discussion will be the exploration of an interdisciplinary research agenda in social interaction design (SxD) that merges social networks and socially...

Pleasantness in bodily experience: A phenomenological inquiry

This study investigated the varieties of pleasantness in bodily experience in order to advance the aesthetics of interaction paradigm. Interviews were held with twelve people varying in age and occupation. They were asked to describe pleasant experiences for Sight, Audition, Smell, Taste, Touch, Action and Thought. A phenomenological reduction...

Beyond image quality: Designing engaging interactions with digital products

Ubiquitous computing (or Ambient Intelligence) promises a world in which information is available anytime anywhere and with which humans can interact in a natural, multimodal way. In such world, perceptual image quality remains an important criterion since most information will be displayed visually, but other criteria such as enjoyment, fun,...

Designing Engaging Interactions with Digital Products

This thesis aims to investigate how the experience of engagement in interaction can be explained by examining the experiences of richness and control and how these experiences are influenced by the features of a product, the expertise of a person and the type of task. This research is carried out within the domain of digital products. From the...