The vision and mission of research under the banner of Ubiquitous Computing has increasingly moved from focusing on the realm of “artifacts” to the realm of “environments”. We seek to scrutinize this very transition, and raise questions that relate to the specific attributes of built environments that set them inherently apart from artifacts. How does an interactive environment differ from an interactive artifact, a collection of artifacts, or an integrated suite of artifacts? Consequently, we ask what are the new user experience dimensions that HCI researchers should merge into their considerations, for example, by supplementing usability and engagement with occupants' comfort across multiple dimensions, and shifting attention from (often) short lifespan and discretionary to durable and immersive experiences? In this contribution, we bring arguments from the literature of environmental psychology and architecture that highlight the points of divergence between artifacts and architecture, and then translate them into challenges for Human-Computer Interaction, and particularly for the emerging domain of Human-Building Interaction.@en

Comfort as a technical term in the domain of architecture has been used meticulously to describe, assess, and understand some of the essential qualities of buildings, across four dimensions: visual, thermal, acoustic, and respiratory. This body of knowledge can be drawn upon to shed light on the growing branch of HCI that pursues a shift from “artifact” to “environment” (and from “usability” to “comfort”). We contribute to this conceptual-contextual transition in three consecutive steps: (1) sketch the outline of comfort studies in the scholar field of Architecture and the ones in Human-Computer Interaction, (2) propose a schematic model of comfort that captures its interactive characteristics and, (3) demonstrate an interactive tool, called ComfortBox, that we prototyped to help answer some of the research questions about the perception of comfort in built environments.@en

he architectural built environments, which so ubiquitously, act as shelters and shape our daily personal and social experiences, can soon be envisioned as being interacted with and mediated through wearables. This conjecture is becoming salient with the increased interactivity of our built environments, and a sustained drive to render them energy efficient. This entails for the upscaled re-design, appropriation, and assessment of functions that are typically ascribed to wearable technologies, as well as the grounding of users’ socio-technical interactions and experiences within the built environments. In this position paper, we discuss this inevitable shift in the role of wearables and the expansion of its functional spectrum to include the built environments and the constituent social constructs, thus facilitating a comprehensive experience of inhabitants’ well-being.@en

Recognizing the relation between inhabitants and their built environmentsas a feedback loop, our aim is to capture the temporality of this loop in various sce-narios of adaptation. We specifically focus on the emerging types of adaptation thatare motivated by digitally acquired personal data, leading to either automation oraction taken by the building stakeholders. Between the microscopic daily mutations(e.g. automated adaptation to occupants’ presence or activity) and the macroscopicevolution of built environments, we identify a “mesoscopic” scale and argue forbroadening its consideration in the research domain of adaptive built environments.In mesoscopic adaptations, inhabitants’ data undergo a process of thorough analy-sis and scrutiny, the results of which inform the re-envisioning of building designfor its next cycles over the course of months-years. This contribution distinguishesand elaborates on four temporal scales of adaptation (minutes-hours, days-weeks,months-years, decades-centuries) and then exemplifies the meso-scale with a studyconducted over three years within a living lab context. Through this example, wealso aim to demonstrate the opportunity for living lab methodologies to contributeto the research on adaptive built environments at the mesoscopic scale.@en

This article provides an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic investigation of visually recognisable aspects of shared work spots in co-working office rooms. We focus on the phenomenon of holding a place in such environments, and document the participants’ practices which constitute distinguishing between empty and taken places. Our investigation leads to a conceptualisation of designed andad hocplaces, noting that objective assessments of rooms’ occupation status are problematic. We propose the notion of markers of presence, i.e. the material objects and their configurations, which participants use to indicate to others that a certain place is taken. Finally, we identify an observation area within the office space which participants recurrently use to assess the availability of work spots. We conclude by pointing out that rather than being tied to static features of material objects, the evidently visible occupational status of shared work spots is dynamically re-produced in participants’ ongoing courses of action.@en

Autonomous Passenger Shuttles (APS) are rapidly becoming an urban public transit alternative. Traversing populous com-mercial and residential centers, these shuttles are already operating in several cities. In the absence of a human driver andembedded means of communicating the autonomous shuttle’s intent, the task of seamlessly navigating crosswalks andpedestrian-friendly zones becomes a challenging pursuit for pedestrians.We contribute to the emerging notion of AV–Pedestrian Interaction by examining the context of autonomous passengershuttles (APS) in real-world settings, and by comparingfourdifferent classes of visual signals – namelyinstructional,symbolic,metaphorical, andanthropomorphic– designed to communicate the shuttle’s intentions. Following a participatory methodologyinvolving local residents and public transport service provider, and working within the framework of inflexible road trafficregulations concerning the operation and testing of autonomous vehicles, we conducted a participatory design workshop, aqualitative, and a survey study. The findings revealed differences across these four classes of signals in terms of pedestrians’subjective perceptions. Anthropomorphic signals were identified as the preferred and effective modality in terms of pedestrians’interpretation of the communicated intent and their perceived sense of attention, confidence, and calmness. Additionally,pedestrians’ experiences while judging the intention oftransitionaryvehicular states (starting/slowing) were reported asperplexing and evoked stress. These findings were translated into design and policy implications in collaboration with otherstakeholders, and exemplify a viable way for assimilating human factors research in urban mobility.@en

This contribution exemplifies how the study of space perception and its impact on space-use behavior can inform sustainable architecture. We describe our attempt to integrate the methods of user research in an architectural project that was focused on optimization of space usage. In an office building, two large office rooms were refurbished to provide desk-sharing opportunities through hot-desking. We studied the space-use behavior of 33 office workers over eight weeks in those two rooms as well as their occasional presence in ten other areas (cafeteria, atrium, meeting rooms, etc.). Quantitative and qualitative analyses were performed to understand the nature and nuances of space occupancy at the scope of the building and within the refurbished offices. While at the scope of building the patterns of movements between rooms were found to be related to the professional profile of the users, at the scope of office the occupancy patterns were influenced by the spatial design of workspaces. More precisely, certain visual attributes of a workspace, namely Visual Exposure and Visual Openness, could determine whether or not it was regularly used. In this paper, we describe our findings in detail and discuss their implications for sustainable building design.@en

We present a structured discussion of the concept of driverless car as a major Ubicomp project, and particularly of its hypothetical integration into the fabric of city. The analytical framework is borrowed from the Transportation and Urban research domains, which provides us with a list of agreed-upon subject matters when accounting for car mobility in urban design. We pose concrete questions about each of these subjects as how self-driven personal vehicles could have a positive or negative impact on them. Out of the six discussed topics, this initial examination showed that driverless car could have a negative impact on five, suggesting smoke detected, and thus the need for broadening such inspections.@en

To investigate the relationship between occupants’ perception of control over building elements and their comfort, we conducted a study where two prototype office rooms were compared: while the first room allowed occupants to open or close the window and configure the shading, the second one was fully automated. The quantitative analysis of collected data a) supports the existing results in the literature reporting higher satisfaction where manual control is maintained, and b) uncovers a new impact of highly automated systems: lower control over building elements can increase the occupant's consciousness of the environmental factors and the saliency of comfort parameters.@en