This work illustrates how artistic robotic systems can provide a reservoir of unfamiliarity and a basis for speculation, to open the field toward new ways of thinking about HRI. We reflect on a collaborative project between design students, a media art studio, and design researchers working with the baggage handling department of the Schiphol airport. Engaging with the industrial context, we developed 'metabehaviours' - abstracted ideas of processes carried out on the worksite-and passed these over to the students who translated them into robotic enactions using a predefined hardware developed by the media art studio. The resulting visit experience challenges the audience to decode the installation in terms of metabehaviours and their possible relations to industrial HRI. We used this to reflect on the value of conducting artistic and speculative work in HRI and to distil actionable recommendations for future research.

This paper presents CareTunes as a concept to explore musical sonification of patient vitals and the role of music in Intensive Care Units (ICU). In this paper, we first describe the design specifications for the sonification of data in a musical fashion. Secondly, we present two applications for CareTunes in prototype stage and user evaluation studies. The first application regards the ICU nurses’ need to monitor patients from a distance (CareTunes as musical updates for nurses) and second application regards families’ need to connect with their loved in the ICU (CareTunes as musical messages for families). We conclude that music has the potential to represent changes in patient vitals for nurses and emotionally regulate families’ anxieties regarding ICU patient’s condition. Music offers a platform for reutilizing patient data for human-centered solutions.

It is a great challenge for design students to learn to work with interaction and interactive technology. They need to learn about interactive prototypes, to work in teams as well as many other things, and within a limited time. In this paper we identify challenges related to maintaining a shared understanding of concept and implementation and propose a technique to keep teams aligned in the process. Existing conceptualisation tools, such as scenarios and storyboards provide little help to plan to code the control flow and algorithms for sensing the user and effecting feedback. User-friendly coding tools and technology as well as many online example projects are available for students to experiment with interactive behaviour. They are encouraged to jump in at the deep end, puzzling together existing code pieces without any planning. As a result, we found that students resort to trial and error problem solving. This often leaves them with spaghetti code which makes it difficult to understand and improve the quality of the interactive behaviour in subsequent design iterations. Typically, student teams divide who is working on the concept and who is dealing with the code. The Acting Machine technique combines the language of State Machines with enacting techniques, and allows designers to first define and run through interaction scenarios using a visual representation that expresses the core design concept, allows for engagement of the whole team, and has a straightforward connection to implemented code. In this paper we describe the technique and discuss our experiences with it in MSc courses on Interaction Design.

In this pictorial we present a project case, where an interactive offce environment was designed following a concurrent prototyping approach embedded in an iterative design process. The case illustrates how concurrent prototyping supports designing complex interactions between multiple people and multiple interactive objects, while innovating in both social and technological realm. Identifed variables of the involved process allow steering the design towards a variety of possible solution qualities. We propose this approach as a viable strategy for dealing with the complexity of designing in the domain of Human-Building Interaction.

It is often assumed that providing occupants with feedback about their energy consumption will encourage them to understand their own contribution to energy consumption and stimulate them to save energy as a result. However, providing such feedback in the form of raw data is known to be too difficult for occupants to interpret. There are many examples where raw data has been replaced by easy to read data visualisations, communicated through metaphors, translated to specific tips, or even turned into playful interfaces and games. However, even such approaches often have short-lived impact on occupant behaviour, as they are often not embedded into complex social practices taking place in building environments, and providing individual feedback to occupants proves insufficient. The challenge of developing energy-feedback designs which may trigger lasting behaviour change by engaging social practices of building occupants was taken up by students following the “Interactive Technology Design” (ITD) course at the IDE faculty of TU Delft.