The COVID-19 pandemic led to a sudden shift to virtual work and events, with the last two years enabling an appropriated and rather simulated togetherness - the hybrid mode. As we return to in-person events, it is important to reflect on not only what we learned about technologies and social justice, but about the types of events we desire, and how to re-design them accordingly. This SIG aims to reflect on hybrid events and their execution: scaling them across sectors, communities, and industries; considering trade-offs when choosing technologies; studying best practices and defining measures of "success"for hybrid events; and finally, identifying and charting the wider social, ethical, and legal implications of hybrid formats. This SIG will consolidate these topics by inviting participants to collaboratively reflect on previous hybrid experiences and what can be learned from them.

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Unlike traditional workshops, SensiBlend is a living experiment about the future of remote, hybrid, and blended experiences within professional and other social contexts. The interplay of interpersonal relationships with tools and spaces—digital and physical—has been abruptly challenged and fundamentally altered as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With this meta-workshop, we seek to scrutinize and advance the role and impact of Ubiquitous Computing in the new “blended” social reality, and raise questions relating to the specific attributes of socio-technical experiences in the future organization of interpersonal relationships. How do we better equip people to deal with blended experiences? What dimensions of socio-technical experiences are at stake? To this end, we will utilize the occasion of a virtual UbiComp in combination with novel remote-working tools and participatory sensing with attendees to collectively examine, discuss, and elicit the potential routes of augmenting social practices in a discourse about the future of blended working, socializing, and living.@en

Human physiology is a window to our physical, mental, and emotional states; our well-being. Today, a new wave of objective data derived from consumer grade body sensors-like those equipped by smartwatches-paves the way toward a new approach in how well-being is being measured, continuously and unobtrusively. Here, we developed a framework for collecting and analyzing physiological data using smartwatches in-the-wild, and demonstrated its robustness in data obtained away from controlled laboratory settings. We found that changes in people's heart rate and heart rate variability are predictive not of momentary well-being (a scientific idea that continues to live on in the absence of in-the-wild evidence, aka, zombie theory) but of daily well-being.

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