Summary The products and services we use daily – bicycles, laptops, grocery delivery apps – are shaped by teams of designers. These designers need to make decisions about what to design and how the final product or service should behave. Since these decisions are complex, multi-layered, and holistic, designers seek to understand the context and (potential) users of their design work. The better the understanding designers develop, the better they can make decisions that impact the final design outcome – in short, better understanding of context and users, better products. This work explores how a novel material – 360° video – gives designers a better understanding of context and people. The ability of 360° video to capture the complete visual context around the camera and give the viewer the affordances of navigating the time and viewpoint of the video enables richer insights.
This work demonstrates that designers can develop novel, multi-perspective insights and use the greater immersion of 360° video to develop a richer, more empathic understanding of context and people. However, this work highlights how the complex nature of 360° video complicates the work of designers – complicating the actions of sharing insights and iteratively engaging with source material that are crucial to design work. In order to understand and support the use of 360° video, this work aims to develop the necessary motivation, knowledge, and tools for designers to engage in the novel practice of 360° Video Design Ethnography – using 360° video to better understand people and their context... ... Read more

Designers often engage with video to gain rich, temporal insights about the context of users, collaboratively analyzing it to gather ideas, challenge assumptions, and foster empathy. To capture the full visual context of users and their situations, designers are adopting 360° video, providing richer, more multi-layered insights. Unfortunately, the spherical nature of 360° video means designers cannot create tangible video artifacts such as storyboards for collaborative analysis. To overcome this limitation, we created Tangi, a web-based tool that converts 360° images into tangible 360° video artifacts, that enable designers to embody and share their insights. Our evaluation with nine experienced designers demonstrates that the artifacts Tangi creates enable tangible interactions found in collaborative workshops and introduce two new capabilities: spatial orientation within 360° environments and linking specific details to the broader 360° context. Since Tangi is an open-source tool, designers can immediately leverage 360° video in collaborative workshops. ... Read more

Designers can immerse themselves into the world of users by using 360° video leading to richer insights and better solutions. However, 360° video is challenging to share and incompatible with existing tools, preventing designers from effectively integrating it into their iterative and collaborative workflows. To address these challenges, we developed D360, a tool that enables designers to view, annotate, and collaboratively analyze 360° video. D360 features a web-based 360° video viewing and annotation tool, a database, and Miro integration to analyze 360° video using a familiar collaborative process. We evaluated D360 using walk-throughs with six professional designers that verified its utility and identified improvements to creating and presenting annotations. By providing both design directions for future 360° video tools for designers and our open source tool, we enable practitioners and researchers to leverage the rich interaction and visual context of 360° video for more impactful insights. ... Read more

The EmpathiCH Workshop aims to blend a diverse set of expertise to expand upon the nascent field of Empathy-Centric Design. Building on the discussions in previous editions of the workshop, this iteration invites contributions which scrutinize the use of empathy as a design principle in digital interfaces. We encourage inquiry in a number of research dimensions: examining the multifaceted nature of empathy; establishing both the requirements and shortcomings of empathy in design research; discussing key post-human stakeholders in digital interfaces (social groups, causes, digital avatars, artificial agents etc.); and expanding the scope of empathy research beyond preliminary perspective-taking. The workshop, structured as a combination of author panels, expert discussion, and interactive activities, provides the ideal venue to foster a critical discussion on the nature of the suitability of empathy in digital design, especially in the rapidly approaching context of its role in post-humanist HCI. ... Read more

The increased ubiquity of 360° video presents a unique opportunity for designers to deeply engage with the world of users by capturing the complete visual context. However, the opportunities and challenges 360° video introduces for video design ethnography are unclear. This study investigates this gap through 16 workshops in which experienced designers engaged with 360° video. Our analysis shows that while 360° video enhances designers’ ability to explore and understand user contexts, it also complicates the process of sharing insights. To address this challenge, we present two opportunities to support the use of 360° video by designers - the creation of designerly 360° video annotation tools, and 360° “screenshots” - in order to enable designers to leverage the complete context of 360° video for user research. ... Read more

Virtual co-embodiment enables two users to share a single avatar in Virtual Reality (VR). During such experiences, the illusion of shared motion control can break during joint-action activities, highlighting the need for position-aware feedback mechanisms. Drawing on the perceptual crossing paradigm, we explore how haptics can enable non-verbal coordination between co-embodied participants. In a within-subjects study (20 participant pairs), we examined the effects of vibrotactile haptic feedback (None, Present) and avatar control distribution (25-75%, 50-50%, 75-25%) across two VR reaching tasks (Targeted, Free-choice) on participants’ Sense of Agency (SoA), co-presence, body ownership, and motion synchrony. We found (a) lower SoA in the free-choice with haptics than without, (b) higher SoA during the shared targeted task, (c) co-presence and body ownership were significantly higher in the free-choice task, (d) players’ hand motions synchronized more in the targeted task. We provide cautionary considerations when including haptic feedback mechanisms for avatar co-embodiment experiences. ... Read more

This paper documents a method for collecting user feedback on broken or malfunctioning devices dubbed Destructive Feedback; where the user deliberately “breaks” the device by removing an affordance. This makes it easier to detect visually and with sensors, as well as discourages others from using a broken device. This method is inspired by turning the bike seats around in the Paris bike share system (Vélib’). A designer lead application of Destructive Feedback would allow for easier detection of faults by users, repair personnel, and the system itself. First, it is unclear how widely used and understood the behavior is in the Vélib’ system; pointing to the need for an ethnographic study. If the benefits in this real example are significant, the main challenge of such a system is to create “destruction” in an easily repairable way, inform users of the meaning of the destruction, and prevent miss-use. Finally,it will be necessary to test example devices with users to gauge feedback, work with engineers to create sturdy “breakable” systems, and compile these findings into a set of design tools and methods that allow designers to implement destructive feedback in other PSS’. ... Read more

The digitization of services and global lock-downs have led an explosion of delivery services, which use gig-workers as delivery personnel. They can face apathy from both their employers and users of the service. Previous studies focused on mediating interactions between workers or workers and tasks. However, delivery presents the opportunity for HCI interventions to mediate the interaction between worker and users to increase their empathy. We conducted an empirical study where 63 participants ordered a drink with an app which presented a different level of information about the delivery person (nothing; name and photo; heart rate). Initial results show no significant impact on empathy measures between conditions, however post-hoc analysis showed that heart rate lead to increased Compassionate and decreased Affective empathy. This raises the question of what "type"of empathy is beneficial for delivery personnel and the need to refine the concept and measures of empathy used in HCI. ... Read more

EmpathiCH aims to bring together and blend a diverse set of expertise to develop a new research agenda in the context of "Empathy-Centric Design".
Building on the discussions that emerged in the previous edition, the main research objective is to form a comprehensive and coherent framework that utilizes empathy as a new dimension of human-factors research and practice. We aim to consolidate the existing theoretical and conceptual constructs of empathy from diverse domains to reflect on its temporality, materiality, and the risks related to its instrumentalization.
With a mix of author panels, expert discussion, and interactive activities, we aim to make this workshop the ideal venue to foster collaboration, expand the community, and shape the future direction of "Empathy-Centric Design". ... Read more

Designers and HCI researchers from industry and academia have been exploring the opportunities that emerge from incorporating behavioral data into the design process. For this, designers employ and combine data from multiple sources, multiple scales, and types to obtain valuable insights that inform and support design decisions. This combination unfolds through interdisciplinary collaborations, enabled by various methods and approaches, including participatory data analysis, sense-making interviews, co-design workshops, and data storytelling. However, due to the personal nature of behavioral data and the open-ended, iterative approach of HumanCentered Design, data-centric design activities clash with current HCI and data science practices. As both industry and academia increasingly use data-centric design processes, we recognize a need to share both examples and experiences to reinforce that most practices (and failed experiences) do not yet emerge solely from the literature. In this Special Interest Group, we aim to provide a space for design, data, and HCI researchers and practitioners to connect, reflect on the current practices, and explore potential approaches to further integrating behavioral data into design activities. ... Read more